Is it time to implement spambot-avoidance procedures?

[Joseph Coveney]

Are there procedures that could be applied to this list without unduly burdening valid first-time users? Maximum of one new topic under the same title per day, for example?

[Richard Williams]

I don't think there is much choice at this point! The board is pretty much worthless now, with dozens if not 100s of spam messages. Really annoying. But I am sure this isn't the first board that has encountered a problem like this so there must be some way to deal with it.

Given that I don't read Chinese (or whatever the language is) does anybody even know what these messages are saying? Maybe somebody who is irritated because we asked them to follow the FAQ is getting his or her revenge!

[Nick Cox]

I think the messages are in Korean, not that I can read them. I don't know more than anyone else on spam, but I suggest that we have to trust StataCorp personnel who do the dirty work of cleaning up after these posts. (As I write, another batch is in progress.)

It's my understanding that these spammers (or the spammer) doesn't care even negatively about Statalist. The aim is purely to get references to whatever they're peddling into search engines.

[ben earnhart]

I don't recall if I had to complete a CAPTCHA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA when I signed up, but I don't think I did. They can be mildly annoying to downright frustrating depending on implementation, but they're common and when implemented well, seem effective enough with minimal annoyance.

[Alan Riley (StataCorp)]

We're working hard to stay ahead of the problem.

As Nick said, the spammers aren't specifically targeting Statalist. They are using software which tries to sign up for many forums in an automated manner. This software is pretty sophisticated, not only automatically filling out the registration form, but performing optical character recognition (OCR) on the CAPTCHA hurdle we have on the registration page, automatically confirming their registration from an email they receive, and then automatically posting many messages.

We're banning them as quickly as we can, and making subtle modifications to the forum software to try to make it more difficult for them to register and post.

As ben earnhart mentioned, CAPTCHA hurdles try to ensure that forms are being submitted by humans by showing them letters or numbers in a crazy pattern and asking the 'user' to type them in. We have had this in place for some time now, but the spam software is sophisticated enough to work its way through this. We had been using reCAPTCHA by Google, but just switched to a different CAPTCHA method to see if that improves the situation.

[ben earnhart]

What about throttling or limiting posts along the lines of what Joseph Coveney suggested? I can't imagine a situation where I'd make more than five new threads per day, for example. Or, fifteen minutes between creating threads. Dunno if the forum software can handle restrictions like this, though.

[Richard Williams]

Did Sony buy out Stata Corp? That would explain a lot of the cyber attacks the board has been having lately.