User twkeel Spamming General S/W Libary

[rprosperi]

More appliance themed spam from user twkeel in the General S/W Library to be cleaned and user removed.

Just a guess, but it appears that bots can make accounts and then post gibberish (fortunately it appears benign).

Maybe the account sign-up should include a captcha field to confuse bots. If so, there is a type that requires the user actually do math to proceed. I've heard (but never seen) that there is an RPN option, which would seem appropriate (thus the problem is '1 2 +' requiring reply of 3 rather than the droll '1 + 2'.

[Dave Hicks]

There is a captcha and an HP-related question (you get to pick one of three). Yesterday there were 373 unsuccessful attempts to create new accounts. (On some days, the number is 2-3 times that high.) Currently about 1 spammer is getting through every ~3 days. But I also get a few emails from people complaining that they weren't able to solve the captcha and/or the security question and some complaining that their IP has been blocked by other anti-spam features in use. I sometimes wonder if some of these are spammers, but it seems that some legit people with HP questions have never used anything but an algebraic HP and are unaware that there are other math systems, so it's tricky to come up with questions that are "just right". (Each of the three current questions is answered incorrectly the majority of the time - but since we seem to have way more spam attempts than legit sign up attempts, that is reasonable.)

On the old forum I simply disallowed all known freemail addresses. While that one simple tool was incredibly successful at stopping spammers (less than one per YEAR got through) some people didn't like it.