SABnzbd Forums

Recently, there have been a number of bot's registering accounts and spamming the forums, such as zhouxiaojie.

Although I hate it myself, maybe something along the lines of CAPTCHA should be included in the sign up process.

We do have a captcha, but it doesn't seem to be effective enough.
My guess is that a bunch of underpaid Chinese people do this manually

Maybe a limit on the number of post's per day/ hour or minute then?

Good idea, that would make me spend less time on the forum

shypike wrote: Good idea, that would make me spend less time on the forum

LOL!!!

Eejit wrote: Maybe a limit on the number of post's per day/ hour or minute then?

Most spam-messages are the first post for an account, so post-limit won't help.
Spam on the SAB forums can be recognized by:
- first post of an account, and/or
- commercial URLs in the signature
- useless content like "wow, that's great. thank you"

I think the first two characteristics should be recognized by a machine. Or prevented by a rule: "the first 10 posts of a certain are not allowed to contain any URLs"

SMF makes writing arbitrary rules like that difficult. And captchas are pretty much worthless at this point, since they just get humans to do the signing up.

sander wrote: Most spam-messages are the first post for an account, so post-limit won't help.

Enforce a 1 or 2 day posting delay on every new account. i.e. new accounts cannot make their first post until 1 or 2 days after the account is created. I don't think many spammers would be bothered coming back if they couldn't post immediately.

krackt wrote:

sander wrote: Most spam-messages are the first post for an account, so post-limit won't help.

Enforce a 1 or 2 day posting delay on every new account. i.e. new accounts cannot make their first post until 1 or 2 days after the account is created. I don't think many spammers would be bothered coming back if they couldn't post immediately.

But that also means when I am new & have a problem I need to wait 2 days ...
Not sure if a lot of users will come back also

rascalli wrote: But that also means when I am new & have a problem I need to wait 2 days ...
Not sure if a lot of users will come back also

Yes there is always a downside but I don't think genuine users would mind if they are made aware of the reasons. I know I wouldn't mind waiting 1 or 2 days.

I would be really angry if I had to wait for 1 or 2 days before I could post.
In fact, I'd be angry as well even if I only had to wait for 1 or 2 hours.
But that's just a spammer talking, lol.

krackt wrote: Yes there is always a downside but I don't think genuine users would mind if they are made aware of the reasons. I know I wouldn't mind waiting 1 or 2 days.

Waiting periods suck. That's why I haven't implemented them.

That's why I suggested a limit on the number of post's per day/ hour or minute.

A genuine poster, one with a problem say, will possibly post once, then wait for a reply for possibly 24 hours.
Any limit could be removed once the post count rises over a set amount, say 10.

I can't see a spammer waiting for these sort of  periods, and if they spammed during earlier post's, the account could be deleted.

Just a thought.

We have many one time spammers.