ThinkBlog

My apologies to you who have recently endured the deluge of spam registrations on ThinkForums.org; I had for a time set the Admin email confirmation instead of the User confirmation, but this didn’t prevent users from signing up, only becoming active. Spam bots, though, don’t make any posts, because the membership list has the spam URLs linked already.

So when I decided to play bouncer, I was ready to do anything. When I noticed that I had 100 users, twenty-four of whom were recent sign-ups with names unrepeatable in polite conversation, I was ready to organize DDoS attacks against all of their IPs—but figured there was probably a less illegal way of handling these intruders.

I’ve been looking for a Captcha MOD for phpBB, so that when new users signed up, they would have to input the alphanumeric contents of a little graphic that machines, presumably, can’t guess. That’s all well and good, but I was frustrated to find that there didn’t seem to be any Captcha MODs for phpBB. What could be the deal? I was on the verge of shutting down the forums till further notice when a phpBB Support Forum search yielded the little golden result: if you can’t see the Captcha option on the Admin menu, your theme is too old to support it and you need to use subSilver. Well, thankyouverymuch. That worked!

So we should see far fewer heinous intrusions of the kind involving XXX and drug-based references in the URLs. Thanks to you who have recently signed up; and thanks to you who will soon sign up but who don’t even know this site exists yet!

My apologies to you who have recently endured the deluge of spam registrations on ThinkForums.org; I had for a time set the Admin email confirmation instead of the User confirmation, but this didn’t prevent users from signing up, only becoming active. Spam bots, though, don’t make any posts, because the membership list has the spam URLs linked already.

So when I decided to play bouncer, I was ready to do anything. When I noticed that I had 100 users, twenty-four of whom were recent sign-ups with names unrepeatable in polite conversation, I was ready to organize DDoS attacks against all of their IPs—but figured there was probably a less illegal way of handling these intruders.

I’ve been looking for a Captcha MOD for phpBB, so that when new users signed up, they would have to input the alphanumeric contents of a little graphic that machines, presumably, can’t guess. That’s all well and good, but I was frustrated to find that there didn’t seem to be any Captcha MODs for phpBB. What could be the deal? I was on the verge of shutting down the forums till further notice when a phpBB Support Forum search yielded the little golden result: if you can’t see the Captcha option on the Admin menu, your theme is too old to support it and you need to use subSilver. Well, thankyouverymuch. That worked!

So we should see far fewer heinous intrusions of the kind involving XXX and drug-based references in the URLs. Thanks to you who have recently signed up; and thanks to you who will soon sign up but who don’t even know this site exists yet!