Over the past couple of weeks I've been catching spam here and there on the forum. Luckily, it's been at a manageable state so it's been easy to handle, but it is annoying to say the least. especially since it fills the userlist with a ton of members that never post. (or can't due to the IP bans in place). So some cleanup has been done to the board.

As of Today, anyone that had a post count of 0 has been deleted. If you ever posted on this board you should have no problem but if you registered and never posted, most likely you'll have to create a new account. I also have other options to handle spam volume, but as of today I don't really see a need to start using them. That will probably change over time however.

As for the spam, I'm just handling them as I see them. If I deem the post or user to be spam by content and an IP or email listing at http://www.stopforumspam.com/ , I delete the post, delete the account and ban the IP range. The spam I'm seeing tends to ask a question and then either posts a sig or has spam links involving console accessories in the body of the question. I would suggest not doing that if you want you're account to be active here.

I've decided to ramp up spam detection on the board.

First off, New users have to go through another captcha, which uses pictures of cats and dogs for identification. It should cut down on automatic bot registrations, but I'm not sure if that's the case going on here.

Second, Initial posts now get screened through a spam filter, which will deny posts if it's deemed to be spam. It doesn't help with banning, but it's better than seeing console junk spam all day. Although I've noticed that they post junk questions in the game forum in order to build a post count before posting. It won't help them here since it's set so high.

Due to heavy spamming the past couple of days. Registration is closed until the bots stop flagging the site.

We will allow registration once a fix is in place or the bots stop. Keep in mind that there's a good chance that we will no longer allow free email client registration on the board when we do come online. (if you currently have an Free email account registered, you're fine. Everyone left is validated so far)

Registration is back online. A eblah modder by the name of Martin has implemented a stopforumspam mod for eblah that automatically filters using our method. It's already stopped 6 registrations so far. Already it's become my favorite mod so far, so Thanks goes to him.

I've also removed the IP ban lists, since it appears to be more effective than banning by IP, so we're going to really put it through the test.