Recent spam problems

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

You may have noticed that we have been plagued with spam (porn, gambling, drugs - the usual suspects) on these forums in the past few days.

Unfortunately dozens of messages are posted at a time, which means it takes us some time to delete them (this does, however, have the advantage of making them easier to spot).

Rest assured that we are working on fixing the problem, although completely eradicating spam isn't really possible - spammers will always find a way around our barriers. Back when phpBB 2 was first released, it was assumed that users with confirmed email addresses were not spammers; this is no longer the case. Later a "visual confirmation" was added to the registration form, which was supposed to stop spammer bots from registering. Yet again, they managed to continue registering.

What we hope to do is bring this problem under control. We have already taken steps to make it harder for spammers to target our forums, and we will monitor the situation over the next few days, to see if our fixes have been effective.

Our apologies for the inconvenience.