Our little spam problem

[Jeremy Bernstein]

Dear OpenChesslers,

We're having a problem with human spammers who have apparently targeted this forum. I am looking for some suggestions about what we could do to combat this issue. There are no real technical solutions to the problem (I've added some registration hurdles for bots at various times, but our real issue are these so-called "humans" who like to spam the forum with ads).

One option is to force registration to go through me, which is a) impractical and b) annoying and c) depressing, so I'm ruling that out. Another option might be to delay posting privileges to new users for a certain number of hours, assuming that most spamming is "spontaneous". However, anyone willing to enter a CAPTCHA string, check their email, confirm their registration and login in order to spam us is probably also willing to wait 24 hours to do so.

If anyone here has some ideas about steps we can take to reduce this, beyond reporting posts and deleting those accounts, please send me a PM. Note that everything we're talking about would only affect new members -- your existing account or login process won't be changing.

Thanks
Jeremy

UPDATE: we've added some additional anti-spam features which will hopefully reduce the amount of spam traffic on the site. New users will be more restricted in their post content than those who have posted a few times (no links and no sigs, for instance). If you run up against any unusual behavior, or feel like you're being improperly targeted by the system, drop me a PM.