ADUK Archive

Sorry for the forum being down over the last few days. We had (along with other forums) had a spam attack and were literally getting 100s of bogus signups a day. Darren (website owner) decided to take it down as he couldn't spend time on sorting it out.

We'll see what happens now.

We re-enabled it and had over 100 sign-ups over night...so we've now disabled new registrations but the forum is active for existing members.

Well see!

Excuse my ignorance, but isn't the Captcha supposed to stop this happening?

martine wrote:We re-enabled it and had over 100 sign-ups over night...so we've now disabled new registrations but the forum is active for existing members.

Well see!

One site I'm a member of has 'peer review', post something sensible* then get approval. Another has a 'no links' until 10 posts policy in place.


* Hah!

On the Mcr 500 forum we got hit too over 1000 spurious signups in less than 24 hrs normally we get 75 to 100.

Real pain in the

jameslb101 wrote:Excuse my ignorance, but isn't the Captcha supposed to stop this happening?

From Wikipedia's CAPTCHA article

Spammers pay about $0.80 to $1.20 for each 1,000 solved CAPTCHAs to companies employing human solvers in Bangladesh, China, India, and many other developing nations.[23] Other sources cite a cost as low as $0.50 for each 1,000 solved.[24]
Another approach involves copying the CAPTCHA images and using them as CAPTCHAs for a high-traffic site owned by the attacker. With enough traffic, the attacker can get a solution to the CAPTCHA puzzle in time to relay it back to the target site.[25] In October 2007, a piece of malware appeared in the wild which enticed users to solve CAPTCHAs in order to see progressively further into a series of striptease images.[26][27] A more recent view is that this is unlikely to work due to unavailability of high-traffic sites and competition by similar sites.[28]

Yeah, Captchas have been useless against spammers for several years!

never noticed