[FIXED] Spam Members

Have any ideas for improvements? Run into any bugs? Let us know here.
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Posts: 3402
Joined: January 2009
I don't know why I'm writing this here, in this topic. It isn't even a bug, but I didn't want to open a forum for this irrelevant thing. So, my question is:

Do I remember wrong that a few days ago there were for about 60 registered user on this forum?? And now as I see there's only 14. What happened to the others? :D

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Posts: 1424
Joined: January 2009
Location: Cupertino, CA
I believe this discussion warrants a new topic.

During the past week, we've been hit by some spam bots. I noticed on Sunday that the number of registered members on this forum was around 90. The users were all registered with random characters as usernames and their registered email addresses were clearly that of a spam bot. So, I decided to do some housecleaning and deleted all of our fake members.

We've also had some spam troubles on the home page with spam comments in the news stories. That has been taken care of as well. Fearing that a true "captcha" system would decrease the usability of our commenting system, I added a script that would require the users to type in "Nolan" before posting. Lucky for us, the spam bots are too dumb enough to realize this and we haven't seen a single spam comment since.

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