Thanks for saving us, Jeff. I'm so glad that somebody is keeping this island of sanity intact.
I suppose we need some fairly comprehensive Turing Test for this, which will not be too much of a hassle for one-time registration.
Can't we include one of those test to determine if the registrant is a bot?
It does...the UBB portal includes a step where the applicant has to re-verify just as everyone else did when they first came here.
I have had well over a thousand "Message could not be delivered to sender" notices in my mail account that I use with the Rant.
They're in the RANT folder, of course, or they are until I delete them.
The bots these days are much smarter than our old software, it seems.
They can spoof real names, email addresses, you name it.
We tried using that "CAPTCHA" feature before, I've never resurrected it yet because it caused some problems when we tried using it.
I might try seeing if I can make the CAPTCHA work.
My IP ban list is a mile long, soooo many IP addresses.
That's pretty much the only bulwark against the bots because once you ban their IP they need another one, etc.
Heh, not much of a bulwark, as I suspect it only takes a nanosecond for a bot to pick a new IP address.
And yes, the OVERWHELMING majority of the bots ARE from Russian ISP's.RU
PL
CZ
Those are three top countries that spam the Rant trying to get in.
