Spam protection

[Blacklord]

Added some more "stuff" to help protect against spam - i'm thinking though that I may need to addd image protection for sign-ups to really eliminate the issue....

[nikoniko]

If you do, it might be worthwhile to roll your own solution. Some of the bots these days handle the standard CAPTCHA image scripts for various forum systems really well. Other bots will simply grab your image, present it to some dope signing up on a XXX/Hacking/Warez/Whatever site, then finish registering here once that person gives them the answer.

It could be more effective to have a variety of very simple text-based questions, like "How much system RAM did the Commodore 128 come with?", as that's not going to be handled by bots that have certain expectations about what they'll find here. A person could still train their system for the right answers, but it wouldn't be worth it for one low-traffic forum.

[nikoniko]

Just heard about ReCAPTCHA today. Fight spam and help OCR books at the same time.

[Moloch]

I'm probably going to add/test this PunBB modification to my forum setups.

http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=16076

##            Notes:  This mod simply adds an extra free-text form field into
##                    the registration page for punBB (register.php) that
##                    prospective users need to complete, and which the forum
##                    administrator can easily customize.
##                    
##                    Forum administrators can specify any sort of question
##                    and the required (numeric or text) response.