These problems almost always occur with forums.  Given my experience running a board, I would strongly encourage not allowing anyone to post who you have not manually vetted.  Otherwise, the forums will be swamped with spam.

It sounds like you have found a good compromise, Rezwan, in allowing new accounts to read but not post.  That way you don’t lose any real readers, but don’t encourage spammers.  I would be very much against requiring any personally identifying information for registration, as the issue of spamming goes both ways, and you don’t want to be collecting unnecessary info that could be used nefariously if your database is compromised.  You really are only trying to confirm the legitimacy of the membership request, and those details don’t really do that, unless you are going to manually check every phone number and address you collect.  Spammers work on volume, and requiring a direct request for posting privileges takes too much time and effort for almost all spamming operations.

Rezwan - 14 July 2011 09:04 AM

I suspect there’s more we can do with the registration form to weed people out - .

As you may recall I’d solved the problem at the software coding forums I admin by shutting off registration and processing manuaIly any emailed reg requests. Nasty solution, and turned out to have severe drawbacks… but I was being overwhelmed and the optical captchas were both useless against the bots and an obstacle to the visually impaired. 

But recently I found a solution hiding in the default forum software that works well, does not require visual acuity and does its own filtering.

In phpBB forums it’s called the Q&A captcha and it simply requires an answer to a question… but the question should be one that requires human cognition to solve and can’t be autogoogled by a bot.

(heh, he said “autogoogled”...)

In the forums mentioned above the questions are simple ones about the game we work with. Anyone with an actual interest should automatically know the answer or can find out quickly.

I turned registration back on and haven’t had a single bot slip through. And they try, oh do they keep trying…

Of course for FFS you’d want your own question/answer sets. Lerner-hakase’s SAT scores. Aarons shoe size.  Why Derek is wearing that ridiculous tie (still hoping for a resonance cascade-type scenario here)...

Anyways, it does work very well and should continue to work well with the right question/answer sets.