Spam attack

[Simon]

Gary, you need to turn off non-members being able to post - all the spam I've deleted today have been by spammers that haven't bothered to try to make an account.

[MoodyGit (Gary)]

I got that after deleting loads myself. I've managed to stop them joining, now I've got to find out where the post block is.

[MoodyGit (Gary)]

I believe I've done it now, let me know if you find any more.

[MoodyGit (Gary)]

Currently the spam is being held at email level. I have banned .ru so they are currently using *mail. com which I cannot really blanket ban. It's easy to spot as they are an English name followed by some random letters, they obviously think I am stupid, anyway why I'm commenting is that today I received an application to join from Albertpedo. I wonder if they ever notice what they are doing.

[Simon]

Ray, not sure if there's anything else you can do on the backend, but I've just deleted 6 pages of spam accounts (dating back a couple of weeks) and there are already 3 new spam accounts set up.
Not sure if you can add a question or two (or even if it's worth the effort)?

[Ray]

I'm not sure I can really do anything about it. I've already tried and failed with various things. We need someone who actually knows about web stuff to sort it out.

[Simon]

I know you can add Captcha or security questions to php, but I'm not 100% how, it would be something you do on the bit beyond the admin side.
I can ask a few people who run php forums if you want?

[Ray]

We already have both. It doesn't help because the spam things mostly bypass the account creation page entirely. I tried to add something to stop this happening but it doesn't seem to have made any difference.

ps. phpbb is the forum software, php is the language it is written in.

[Simon]

Ah, ok, doesn't matter then. Will continue to do the semi-regular check.

[Ray]

I agree it has gone crazy the last few days though. The number of new account emails I have had is way higher than normal