Stricter registration policies...

[les]

Ahhh, yes, CAPTCHAs, who doesn't love them?



No, but seriously: Antispam measures should be invisible. You can use a CAPTCHA as a last resort, but normally you shouldn't need to (unless your site is so big that spammers write bots specifically targeting you.) Even then, it's arguable whether CAPTCHAs are worthwhile. Every CAPTCHA worth breaking has been broken. Computers are actually better at doing repetitive tasks reliably than humans, so the very idea of a CAPTCHA is flawed imho.

What the point of confirmation emails is I've never understood. If a user wants to provide a fake email there are plenty of services that allow you to get a disposable one. And spammers use free webmail services to receive confirmation mails.

The only good way to beat spam is by its only defining characteristic: bulk. Normal users don't post 250000 comments per day all over the Internet, spammers do. And that's something a large site like Facebook or Google can detect. Again, for smaller sites it's usually enough to just make a form that confuses the commonly used bots.

[janmb]

I have read that before Les.

Seraph is dead wrong in the arguments against CAPTCHA, but there is another argument against it that IS relevant: They would probably be largely ineffective against the type of spam we see here on milo... Not because CAPTCHAs don't do their job - the better ones certainly do - but because I suspect most of the relatively few spam accounts here on milo are manually registered accounts anyway - in which case CAPTCHAs do nothing for you what so ever.

The basic idea here though is to worker harder to find proactive solutions. If spammers are allowed to spam, even if they are fairly quickly reported and eventually removed, they can do a lot of damage in the mean time.

And most importantly: They create a significant workload for the staff.

[supermokkori]

Newest user:

http://www.milovana.com/forum/memberlis ... le&u=29900

in 11 minutes of activity, posted 15 new threads.

Anyway, perhaps this thread should be closed (or merged) as there's another thread that's a bit more active on the same subject:
http://www.milovana.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10684