Is it possible to simply block anything from China?
I have no idea if this is even possible but if we lose what one maybe two people while saving all this spam, wouldn't that be worth it?

We've had at least one member who was based in China.

There may be a setting to have the first, or first x posts by a new user put into moderation, which might put spammers off.

That's an idea, and from someone who does not know this sort of stuff...
Is it possible to maybe have a message sent to anyone new saying you need to post say 3 times before the site will allow the real post to show. I think such a minor inconvenience to thwart spammers would be appreciated by a new member? and that's if something like this is even possible!?
Or is it possible to have a person send an email request to have us actually permit postings? I can't believe we have more than a few real people a week register (if that) and this extra step would be easy and effective???

FYI, I killed 2 more this morning and I see several more in areas I can not moderate (fantasy, Civ, Game of thrones) If you want to allow me access to those areas I can keep them under watch as well, my special moderation abilities are limited to me cleaning such spam ONLY, I have no clue how to do anything else and I never even look at all the abilities I supposedly have so no worries there.

How about deleting the obvious spam accounts. They seem to come back to post after creating the account. They also clutter up the member list.

We got hammered last night. before heading to bed I checked the site and I ended up deleting about 20 spam postings! and that doesn't include the half dozen or so I have no ability to delete!
This crap is just ruining things

I went in thinking I would delete these users and did one, then figured we probably had a lot ...holy crap we have hundreds of these! There has to be a way to select large groups and mass delete them but this is beyond me, it would take me a week to do this the way I know how!

bbauska wrote:It is the busy season for my business. I am trying to clear them as they come up. When I am not running around with my hair on fire, I will start clearing them.

Well, my question of the week is, how did we avoid (for the most part) these in the past?

Neal and Brad
I found this forum on the phpBB web site. Users discuss a variety of built-in solutions and add-in approaches to minimizing spam-bots, which seem to be plaguing our site.

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=2122696

The information relates specifically to version 3.0.6 and above, with a link to solutions for older versions. Not sure which version we are on, though. The subtle indicator at the bottom does not list the version number. But based on the copyright dates, I'm guessing we are not in 3.0?

George

I just deleted a supposed user that was quite tricky. He registered, had an avatar picked out and he replied to existing topics in a way that sounded like he was playing along. Something like "Useful information, I will have to print this out and consider your position" (or SOMETHING like that) But he had profile links to several sites (gold mostly) and when you saw his posts, they were to OLD topics and his reply had nothing to do with what had been stated all along. Quite slick, but he's been eliminated!

Maybe you have done the same already? But I started not simply deleting postings but instead, I delete the USER and when doing so (at the bottom of that section) you can choose to also delete all that persons postings. That allows me to delete this spam in areas I can not access and it deletes the user forever as well.

I was trying to post something on web diplomacy the other day, I had to register but before I could post anything, I had to first post in some sort of welcome page, after they see I am a real person, THEN they grant posting rights. Could that work here????

I deleted 18 users today alone and it's only half way over. I see me deleting users, Brad and Sloterp deleting messages every day in LARGE numbers. In fact, while deleting several just now, a new one popped up! I mentioned some diplomacy discussion board elsewhere, you need to sign up and post a welcome, let me in sort of message before they allow you to post anywhere else. If we had that, so what if the welcome section got a handful of spam messages? Nobody but a few moderators would be reading that section anyways? I know this "can" be done, but are any here savvy enough to figure this out?