Dealing with spammers

We're aware of spam arriving on the site by hired people rather than bots. The tactics don't change though. As the OP says, just don't reply and report them, and we'll clean them up. We're introducing minimum rep limits for various activities to try and limit their impact. This can sometimes inconvenience genuine new users but unfortunately it's the price we have to pay to keep the boards spam-free.

I found out how to deal with bots:

<img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle">

So people, what methods are you using to keep bots away from your site?

They are really annoying, they consume all of my site's bandwidth. Everyday I get many of them. Imagine that they are about 20-30 online, the same time! They are all from the same IP range..

Block them, block their IP's? Do what!?

Zollie08: Read the blog article about reducing spam

Just want to draw attention to this post again: we're starting to get spammers who are a little more subtle. They'll take some random sentence from earlier in the thread to look like they're participating, but have spam links in their signatures. Don't forget to report any posts you find suspicious and we'll check them out.

...and some spammers even occasionally reply to this thread. Thanks for the heads up :)

Ok admin.i got it. But what about those who want to put some links in their posts?

steveyaar - links aimed at promotion are removed outright, without notice, regardless of the user. So just don't post promotional links.

Ok..Thanks a ton.

The bots have become smart with captcha. There is one simple way to stop the bots. Have a randomized question. Simple ones like what is the capital of england. What colour is the sky. Bots can't get through these. Simple but incredibly effective!

The bots have become smart with captcha. There is one simple way to stop the bots. Have a randomized question. Simple ones like what is the capital of england. What colour is the sky. Bots can't get through these. Simple but incredibly effective!

Gamefreaks1234: You're wrong unfortunately. Spammers won't hesitate to pay humans to collect the (limited) number of questions and their answers.

Once the collection is done, any bot can use this dictionary and pass what is nothing more than a captcha.

If you're interested in the subject here's a blog article by Tom.

Yeah, I think most the spam we get these days is by humans, so there's always going to be a bit of manual cleanup to do.

Often those who speak very bad english are bot's, not foreigners.

I think we should only allow westerners here.

Ah see i was mentioning about bots. I had 114 odd bots join my site in a month. I did exactly what i just said and haven't had a single bot in the past year. The makers of bots could not care less about your sites specifically. So they will not even try to get through such a website specific protection. They just care about the majority (captcha). Also there is no protection from human spam. Except maybe a question on sign up asking them if they are a spammer lol. If they were to answer that question well... Life would be a little easier!

Exactly. I had an input box with with the text put these three words togheter (without citation marks) "bear+cactus+dog"

It works.