Happier Abroad Forum Community

Well changing the humanizer question seems to have worked. The spam registrations have stopped. So I've re-enabled user activation for now.

If any legit users out there tried to register during the last few days and got their account deleted, then sorry about that.

I wonder if all these spam accounts came from one source that cracked the humanizer question. Weird.

Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope they don't come back.

Do you think my new humanizer question is going to deter legit new members? Does it require too much effort to find the answer to?

Announcement:

I've set the forum admin panel it so that newly registered users cannot send any PM's to anyone. That should prevent spammers from coming on and mass PMing all of you. After they have 3 posts approved, then they will automatically become normal registered users. Only then can they send PM's to other members. That should fix the PM spam problem.

I'm also thinking about disabling new user registrations for a few days or so. Maybe that will deter all these Russian spammers or spambots from coming back. After they see that this forum is closed for registration, will they move on and forget this forum? What do you all think?

The thing is, I stopped the spam here before by using humanizer questions on the registration page that cannot be Googled. For example: "What is the second word of the name of this website?" A bot cannot google the answer to that, because it is specific to this site only. So that stopped the spam bots before. How are they getting past those un-googleable humanizer questions now? Should I change the humanizer questions? Or disable registrations for a while in the hopes that they will move on and forget about us?

Change the questions.... regularly...

You have to keep on testing new strategies...There are no one answers to that, else Russians wouldn't be called the best hackers on earth

Try everything and see which works...Try everything that comes to your mind, try combinations of all and see which one holds the ground.

Russians are very close to the Artificial Intelligence that runs this planet, some of the energy I feel comes through them as well....

The_Adventurer wrote:Change the questions.... regularly...

Ok I've changed the humanizer questions. I've also banned common email domains from Russia such as mail.ru, yandex.ru and rambler.ru. Hope that will deter the Russian spammers. We will see.