[Caius]

Chris,

It seems that these spam postings are occurring more frequently. Can you implement some kind of enhanced "bot" check to raise the barrier to entry? It would be nice to not have to delete a posting every time I come to the forum.

To all spammers: buy a copy of the Divine Comedy game. Note the torments that await the likes of you...

[Chris]

Sorry I took so long to reply. At present, new users have to complete Captchas, so presumably the spambots have got past that stage. I can't find a button to make every post fill in a captcha even if registered, though I did find one to increase the difficulty of the captcha (by adding noise). I also can't find a button to notify me every time anyone posts anything - I hate finding posts three days late. I'm not an a expert at these board thingies!

So what I've done is this: Caius, you are not elevated to "full admin" status. Which means, as far as I can tell, that you can do everything I can do. Probably a lot more since when I get a problem on the forum all I can do is stare at the screen like a caveman, grunt, and hit the monitor with a bone. Hopefully you can find stuff on the control panel that I can't.

Of course, if this post by "Caius" is actually a sophisticated spam, and I've just given unlimited permissions to a spambot, then we're all in big, big trouble.

[Caius]

Chris, I thank you for your cooperation with my... plans...

I'll see what I can come up with.

[Chris]

Thanks for accepting the poisoned chalice - er, I mean the honor. It's good to know there's at least one computer literate person with his hand on the wheel

[Caius]

What? You're the one doing a twenty-year computer game project.

I did finally find the admin control panel - wow, that's really buried. And BIG! If I find something that can help, I'll let you know.

[Caius]

We could consider doing the following:
General --> Board Configuration --> Post Settings --> Posting --> Enable Queued Posts, and set Maximum post count for queued posts to 1.
That's if we ever get really frustrated with the spam. Probably an extreme measure.

I also couldn't find the option to email you whenever someone posts. I'll take a look at the phpBB website and hopefully find something there.

Also, there is an update (3.0.6) available that provides improved captchas and a bunch of bugfixes. Backing up the forum and updating it to the new version is probably a good idea.

[Chris]

Thanks for doing that! Regarding email updates, I've noticed that each sub-forum has a tick box that anyone can use at the very bottom It seems to work for this one (I got an alert for your post, for example) but I thought I already had it ticked for other forums, yet didn't get any notice. Very confusing. Anyway, I've backed up the forum, and will now go and hunt for an upgrade button.

[Chris]

Well that was fairly painless. The board is now using the latest upgrade, so I'm going a-hunting for captchas. I'll see if I can captcha anything new in the endless jungle of the control panel.

[Chris]

I've reduced the retry attempts from 5 to 3, stopped users from changing the captcha, and made it 3d (because I couldn't understand the 2d one!) I don't remember seeing all those settings before, but on the other hand I can't remember what I ad for dinner yesterday ether. Still can't find any "use catcha every time" option. Feel free to change any of this in any way you want.

[Caius]

I like the new captcha!

I did change it so that users can refresh the captcha image, though - my gut feeling is that most bot programs aren't smart enough to use the "retry" button, and I'd hate for a real user to be frustrated by an indecipherable captcha.

Let's hope the new captcha takes care of the problem. If things don't get better, we can always consider having a moderator/admin approve any user's first post.