Problem Can we do something about the Spam?

[ShneekeyTheLost]

How about this:

1) New users who register have a five minute to thirty minute cooldown before they may post again.
2) New users under this restriction who attempt to make fundamentally the same post more than twice are automatically banned and posts deleted
3) To remove this restriction, a user must click on a 'verify me' button and answer a question. Such questions can be "What does FTB stand for", "What version of Minecraft did FTB originally get created for" and the like. Easy questions that almost everyone already knows the answers to, but are not able to be discerned by a robot. Most bots aren't able to click on a 'verify me' button post-creation if it is in your profile settings, and a question like that is very difficult for a bot to answer.

Alternately...

Require email verification to be able to post. Ban any accounts with emails from known bad domains preemptively.

 

[Quetzi]

Custom CAPTCHA does not work, we've tried it. The vast majority of this current swathe of bots use gmail accounts, can't exactly ban that. We already have restrictions in place for new accounts. As I said though, we are using all our current tools, and they stop easily 95%+ of the spam. Unfortunately, no amount of dreaming up new restrictions we can place on new users is going to fix the spam.

 

[Hambeau]

Of course, there's an old standby that works reasonably well except it relies on the forum reader to generate a little bit of skull sweat: Read the post title and see if it has an iota of even the merest chance of pertaining in some obscure way to Minecraft, Mojang, FtB or modding in general

 

[MrMonsterGuy18]

Of course, there's an old standby that works reasonably well except it relies on the forum reader to generate a little bit of skull sweat: Read the post title and see if it has an iota of even the merest chance of pertaining in some obscure way to Minecraft, Mojang, FtB or modding in general

What about most of the genral section, only the pack creation part is related to your above things

 

[Baconus_Yum]

I remember a different forum had the same problem:

They Fixed it by requiring the first 3 posts (or more if the first 3 had not been approved yet) to be put into moderation, then it will be approved/denied by staff. There was almost no spam visible after that.

It might be a bit of work for a forum as big as this though.

-Baconus

 

[Quetzi]

Won't really work in our case as we often get new users requiring support and pushing all those messages into the already large moderation queue doesn't get them the help they want now. We have some new plugins that are doing a good job at keeping the spam off the boards, you'll notice that occasionally one will get through with just garbage, this is because they are humans trying to get around the spam filters. I have a lot more tools at my disposal now, but I'd still rather keep the forums usable for regular users. Let me know if stuff you aren't expecting is getting flagged and I'll take a look.