No yahoo.com anymore

[EgonOlsen]

Due to massive spam registrations in the last few months, i decided to ban all yahoo.com addresses from registration. If you are already registered with such an address, this shouldn't matter. If this prevents you from registering, i'm really sorry....unless you are a spammer from vietnam. In that case, do me a favor and die. Thank you!

[fir3d]

I was wondering why I couldnt register, it kept on saying Im not allowed 

[EgonOlsen]

I'm sorry about this, but it was the only possibility to exclude those fuckers from registering hundreds of fake accounts, because they were using dynamic IP that i couldn't ban.

[EgonOlsen]

A few numbers: Since January, 16th, 1567 registrations have been banned...plus a few hundreds that i deleted manually, this means around 16 fake accounts per day!
I don't get it...Google (or any other search engine) doesn't give a shit about links in signatures and/or forum profiles. Those fuckers just pollute the forums with their pointless accounts for no gain at all.

[zammbi]

We ran phpBB for our game forum and it just got a ton of spam signups. We couldn't stop the bots no matter what we did. Even when our captcha was very hard.
Now we have IPB, with a custom login (uses game accounts). Its great not worrying about any spam bots at all.

[EgonOlsen]

After switching to SMF, i never had a problem with spam bots until the beginning of 2010, where it really took of. I've already improved the captcha by hacking the source but to no avail. I also tried alternative captchas, but there were either faulty, didn't work on my server or where a pain in the ass to install.

[fir3d]

it took me a while to figure out, maybe you should put something about it on the registration page

there is also another way in smf where you can wait for administrator to approve all registrations, even though it would make it a lot more tedious.

[EgonOlsen]

Maybe i should add something like that...but i have to remember to restore it after each update...

Making the admin (me) approve all registrations doesn't help...i would still have to delete them and i don't want to delete up to 20 bogus accounts each day.

[raft]

Those fuckers just pollute the forums with their pointless accounts for no gain at all.

i think gain plays a minor role there. this is kind of sickly masturbation. 'i do that because i can' kind of thing
anyway, i understand your pain and wish you luck with that

[EgonOlsen]

yahoo.com is open again for now, because they actually stopped using it. The new craze is to use mail adresses with <somestupiddomainnamethatmakesnosenseatall>.info...i'm close to ban everything with .info...

[paulscode]

.info domains are currently quite cheap (under a buck individually, and only a few cents if bought in bulk), so the spammers can buy a load of random domains that aren't recognized by current spam-controls, and set them up to patrol the web for known forum vulnerabilities and to send out tons of spam emails.  If they pump out a high enough volume in a short amount of time, they probably can make a quick buck from the very small percentage of receivers (including forum administrators such as yourself) who actually click on one of the millions of ad links sent out before they are banned.  My guess is as the .info thing gets figured out, they'll just switch to some new tactic.

[zammbi]

Can't you add captcha? Or a register question?

[EgonOlsen]

There is a captcha...it's build in the forum, but it's too weak. I've already tweaked it by altering the source code, but it's still too weak. I tried several other ones...they either required a connection from my server to another (which i can't do) or were too difficult to install given that you have to repeat the process for each forum update. Problem is, that for these php guys, a "plugin" in an automatic search and replace in the source code at best...or by hand at worst.

[zammbi]

Oh I thought SMF was better than that. My forums used to be phpBB and that was totally crap. So moved the community over to IPB 3, and its worked great.

Maybe you could try SMF 2.0 and see if its any better, its in RC 3...

[EgonOlsen]

While yahoo.com is still open for registering, yahoo.co.uk is blocked for now. Too many dickheads are using this for spam registrations right now.