Milovana.com

Hey everyone,

We launched a new user registration form today! If you want to take a look, log out and go here.

The new form should mean that spam bots have a harder time registering, because it's custom and bots are looking for the standard forum signup procedure. We'll see if it has the intended effect.

At the same time, we simplified the form a bit and added automatic redirects that take you back to the page you were trying to access. So new users trying to create teases for example should have a more pleasant and seamless experience when they decide to sign up.

Let us know know if anything isn't working the way it should with the new registration via the forums or via [email protected]. Thanks!

Cheers,

Seraph0x

It seems like there is more forum spam than ever today! So I'm not sure it's working...

cactusman wrote:It seems like there is more forum spam than ever today! So I'm not sure it's working...

I concur
and now spam in this thread toooooooo

Yeah, it's looking like the bots are quite smart enough to fill out the registration form even if it's custom. I've added a honeypot field, which means bots without a full JavaScript engine should now fail - let's see how it goes.

@Moderators: Please don't delete spam for the time being. I gotta keep a sense of the amount as I'm tweaking the signup form. Please drop me a PM though when you find some spam.

@Users: Please use the report function to mark spam for us. Thanks!!

Maybe add a custom question, that is specific to this site, like:
What do you call a story with sexy pictures?
What is the phrase in the site's logo?
Should be easy to answer for any user, but only bots specifically targeting this site should be able to circumvent it.

its cheesie but ok

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.