Spams are ruining the site

prowla

This current spate of spam messages is ruining the site for me.

The messages are all in the same style, including a phone number in the title and repeated similar lines in the body, which would not be in a valid post.

Surely rules can be written to catch these proactively, rather than waiting for people to flag them as spam.

Another option would be to add a validation step to a new account, eg a confirmation email, before a new user can post.

GDB2222

There is one user Harrington who has just posted over twenty of these messages. The trouble is that spammers can easily outwit any account validation measures, even if it needs a bit of manual intervention on their part.

I suggest not allowing so many posts on a new account though. Maybe limit to 3 a day for the first week and until a poster has at least 6 posts that are not spam. It is not foolproof but it limits the damage.

redux

I'm feeling that MSE don't understand this problem.

I was asked several times earlier this morning to solve a captcha while trying to post. Trouble was the captcha image was blank.

After several changes to browser settings I eventually succeeded.

Clearly the automatic spambots aren't being required to do this.

How can I avoid the captcha in future? Do an antivirus check.

Whoever wrote that doesn't understand the difference between email spam and forum spam.