SPAMMERS gotta go!
 

Okay, I'm sick and tired of the amount of SPAM we have to delete and the number of users we have to BAN.

I was just on a Sci-Fi forum and one of the steps in registration was correctly identifying certain sci fi characters

Ex:

Who is the Captain of Serenity?

1) Captain Reynolds
2) Captain Kirk
3) Captain Picard
4) Captain Janeway

Who is famous for saying "Stop, Dave, I'm Afraid"

1) Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey
2) Korben Dallas from The Fifth Element
3) Gort the robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still
4) Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation

Even if someone did not know the answer, a real human being could google the answer and pass the quiz.

We should have a challenge quiz like this:

Which one of these is a HANDGUN:
1) Glock 17
2) Remington 870
3) Colt AR-15
4) PPSH-41

In the vast majority of Movie Westerns, the cowboys use a:
1) Single Action Army
2) Winchester Model 70 rifle
3) SPAS-12 Shotgun
4) Walther PPK

If anyone doesn't know these obvious questions, they should NOT be making contributions to IMFDB.

Thoughts?

That's awesome. On a technical level, I wonder if we can pull that off.

That is an awesome idea. We should implement it somehow.

Just so you guys know, Chris and I are working on a number of different options to try to limit the spam. I know it's getting annoying but please know we are working on this. It's not as easy as you might think.

UPDATE: As of 9:35 (Pacific Time), registration is disabled for the time being. There will be no new user accounts until further notice.

All that's left is to weed out any current user that might still be spammers or trolls.

As of yesterday, I can't log into IMFDB. Just great. The login button doesn't recognize my mouse cursor and won't let me 'click it'. What is up with that? :mad:

Oh well, no uploads for me until this is figured out.

MPM

MPM,

Have you tried going to back to the main page after you lose your cursor and trying to log in again? The disappearing cursor happens to me a lot and that's what I do.

That's happened to me on occasion. Usually after I type my username and password, I quickly press enter

Those replies are actually pretty easy to get around, most of these little sods can do rudimentary image recognition to solve jpeg Capchas, nevermind just throwing random numbers at a text challenge and keeping a text log of the question / answer pairs.

Really, given we're not a regular wiki and don't really need users who don't know anything, why not ask people to explain what they want to have the account for and manually approve accounts? Sure, it'll mean a backlog to work through, but at least it won't be a backlog to work through and spam to delete.

I think this is settled. (: I've set up a plugin so that everyone must 'apply' to join the wiki, one of the requirements is a short 25 word biography (Evil Tim's suggestion). ZERO spam applications are getting through. Applications have to be approved manually everyday but that's pretty trivial compared to having to undo all the spam we were dealing with. I've been running this for a couple days now and have approved two new users and have seen ZERO spam on the wiki.

Are you making everyone use their real names? The two new users look like they used real names.

That was the case at first but we changed it. Now you can use whatever name you want.

So hopefully the Spammers will now leave us alone.

I actually REALLY like this idea!! Smart thinking! I'm on other unrelated forums, and I had never gotten a PM until I registered here, in which my PM inbox was flooded with spam. So much spam there was even spam of people asking me how to spam. Oi.