Huge jump in spam registrations

[CaptOblivious]

Just noticed that since moving to the new software, we've had a HUGE jump in spammer registrations. First bit of actual spam got posted a few minutes ago. Took this as an exercise in learning the moderation system. I enabled warnings—I don't know if you had disabled that on purpose? Just to play around.

 

Anyway, I upped the sensitivity on the detection of potentially spammy accounts, and will be embarking on deleting all the hundreds of pending accounts that will never be activated. Is there anything else we can do?

[Martijn Meerts]

Since the move we've started using much more SEO friendly URLs as well as have various other SEO things in place (sitemaps and the like), so we should show up better on Google Search. That also means it's likely we get more potential spammers.

 

There is a spam filter in place for user registrations, so I believe a lot of them are already filtered out. Other than that I guess the only thing we can do is report spam posts, and make sure they also get reported to Invision's spam service. Since the spammers are real people with valid email addresses, there's little else we can do apart from very drastic measures such as not allowing any posting until you've been registered for x days, which seems like a bad idea ;)