Automagic Registration Disabled

[TFCAdmin]

So far so good. Been getting lots of registrations. Only a handful have PM'd me for access.

I figure, if someone cares enough to PM for access, they care enough to be a part of our community.

-TFCAdmin

[ScottyDM]

Gathering account data from those accounts that generated spam I could see a definite pattern to how the spammer filled out the form. After my "Death to Link Spammers!" post in January, that link spammer stopped posting, but continued to churn new accounts. However, someone(s) were generating many new accounts and never used any of them, and there was a degree of pattern to many of those other accounts (a different pattern and not as strong).

I'm curious as to how many humans create an account, but never use it--as opposed to how many accounts were created by bots.


I guess it's one of those "forever" projects... for me to create that login/story submission system with a comprehensive Turing test on the front end. Of course it could not ferret out a human user who signs up but abandons the account, only a machine. Someday this year I'll complete v1.0 of that project. TF Central might make a reasonable testbed for the Turing test front end since we here seem to be a target of more than one professional link spammer.

Speaking of new forum software have you seen Simple Machines' open source offering? http://www.simplemachines.org/

Scotty