Board Game Designers Forum

No apologies necessary. I for one am grateful that such a forum exists and for those who maintain it. Thank you. A few spammers is a small price to pay for how valuable a resource this forum is. The insight and knowhow freely given by the members of this forum is remarkable.

I still thin it's worthwhile, I just hope to make it sharper looking and even more useful!

It is already the premiere forum for amateur game designers. Of course a better product is always worth striving for, much in the same way we all work to refine our games. I'm sure with the talents and ideas of the forums members some productive ways to improve the site can be found. Just don't underestimate how good bgdf is now; to me it has a much better and less cluttered interface than boardgamegeek. That site is full of info but atrocious to navigate.

Seth, have you ever tried creating a trap for spammers? A game store near where I live recently started their own online forum, and this is essentially what they do. They still get a ridiculous number of spam accounts that they have to delete by hand, but the spamming doesn't interfere as obviously with the forum.

If you want to check it out, here it is:

http://7thdimensiongames.com/forum/

Best of luck!

-Blake

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=427852

This is helpful but a few other tricks can work as well. The main thing Id need to know is what countermeasures you have tried and what effect did they have. For instance, you did enable Captcha for a bit their, what was its impact on spam. Although Im not a PHP pro I have have a variety of code savvy friends at my disposal; answering a few questions gives me the information I need to ask them "informed" questions and possibly generate solutions.

E

I assume the reason they are doing this is because they are trying to boost their Google rank, right? Is there a way that you could disable people from posting links?

It would be a little annoying, but I feel like it's not too big of a price to pay. You could still write www. webpage_name .com, or something like that, right?

Alternatively, make a rule that you can't post links until you have been on at least N weeks and made at least X posts. Would that be possible, and would that be against the spirit of bgdf?

I would like some required fields when signing up. something like "What brought you to this site?" and "What company makes your favorite board game?" or something along those lines. something really simple. Along with this, you could personally approve everyone that signs up. (I don't know the numbers of new users per day is) If it isn't too stressful, the hands-on approach would certainly cut down on the spam.

bots can be dealt with, but unless a mod personally approves and supervises each new member, you will never truly be free of human spammers.

I like the idea of making new members (time based, or post based? my instinct is maybe both) unable to post links.

assuming that most spammers are non-english speakers, you could make a forum or thread where anyone who posts in it is automatically banned and their post deleted, label it as such, and then include a bunch of key words that will make it show up high on spammer's forum-trawling lists (casino, video game, cheat code, whatever).

a post limit (one per minute?) might also work, although it's annoying for people like me who log in and want to respond to a bunch of threads. less annoying than wading through spam though.

Most of us are happy to have the BGDF regardless of spammers. I have no good solutions to offer, just thanks for the efforts.

A good post you may want to look at.
http://www.thesamet.com/blog/2006/12/21/fighting-spam-on-phpbb-forums/

It's simple but effective. Something similar has kept my forums mostly clean.

Also, I don't know if it's true, but I thought I'd heard that computers could break the math problems pretty easily, because they can be made to recognize numbers and they're good at math. Questions like "How long was the 6 day war" or "What color is a white elephant" seem like they could work better though.

nonono, Seth, thanks for hosting this site now. Thank YOU!

For a little while we seemed to have a respite, but spammers have started joining the site and posting blogs about their stupid Ed Hardy this or Jewelry that.

Sorry again guys :/

I swear, as soon as Eminent Domain goes to the printer I will start putting my plan for fixing this situation into action!

Also, I would love to require each new member to be approved by me, but I can't even figure out how to do that!

Someone mentioned moderating posts for new members until I say "ok" - I'd be for that as well if I could figure out how to do it - ideally every new member would need moderation until an Admin clicked some button to turn that off (on a person by person basis). That would be sweet.

I just found where I can make it so any new account must be approved by an admin. How the hell did I miss that before? I turned that on, so at least new spammers will get blocked automatically.

Looks like we have some sleepers though who have been members for days or weeks and are all right now choosing to post spam. Sorry about all that.

- Seth

I think that some software seems to encounter more problems than others, when it comes to dealing with automated spambot postings.

On my forum, I use MyBB forum software, and for dealing with Spambot postings, I found a Regular Expression plug-in that has effectively eliminated automated spambot registrations, which in turn addressed the problem of spambot postings in the forum.

I don't manually approve any new site user sign-ups for the forum, either.

It's not the best system, but it's better than it was!

Would it help to have more spam patrollers (users who can flag spam/remove it)? I am not sure what that looks like on the tech side, or perhaps a way to report spam to make your job easier. What you already do is much appreciated!

I believe this new system will work until further notice, I just hope it doesn't put any undue annoyance on people trying to legitimately make an account.