Yes. So far virtually all of the new applicants are spammers. We do not get hordes of real would-be emusers. But we don't want to miss the occasional real one (there have been a trickle - somewhere between three and five since December depending if those are all real - and among those the even more occasional real one who joins the conversation (I'm looking at you, rostasi)). Of course some others could be following sound internet wisdom of lurking a while before posting. Yes, most should be considered spammers and are being; the trick is not missing the few.
Could we just moderate their first post? ( @kargatron )
Moderation is currently set for Noob posts. Noobs are people who have registered but have not confirmed their email. If a Noob posts before confirming their email they get moderated. Half a dozen Noobs have posted spam and I have moderated and deleted them. This does keep spam posts out of the threads - the action is all hidden in the dashboard. I have also been checking the list of Noobs who have not yet posted against lists of known spammer emails/IPs (using stopforumspam.com) and deleting them before they get going, just to keep the user list tidy. The neat freak in me doesn't want the user list to get ever more bloated with dead spambot accounts. They have been coming in hourly or more.
Should we approve them if the email address looks valid? ( @Katrina )
As soon as they confirm an email address, they get shifted to the applicant list. As Katrina noted above, it is sometimes harder there to tell just from their email whether they are spammers (though many email addresses are in the stopforumspam.com database). There is always the chance that some real human being has a yahoo email with lots of numbers in it. But in the applicant list we can see what they wrote in the field that asked them why they wanted to join - and it's so far exactly the same for every spambot as I noted a few posts above. Only applicants that provided a real English utterance will get accepted as members. (Oh, and people whose user name is "SexcamsOa" get declined. That one has already joined twice.)
Moderation again
Note that as soon as they are accepted from the applicants list they are members and can post without moderation. There does not seem to be any option for, say, moderating someone for their first month of membership. Once they are members, moderation goes away, otherwise everyone's posts would be moderated; y'all are also members and I can only turn it on or off per user category, not per user. Maybe it's possible to create some kind of new member category, I don't know enough.
In sum
Now that I have figured out what it's doing, the current system kind of works, provided we are cautious with the applicants list. What is daunting me is the volume (and resulting time needed to stay on top of it). If eythian can find a way of making a tighter initial filter that should help with that.
Random extra
I am kind of glad we are not using captcha any more having read up on the problems it creates for visually impaired users of the internet, and given that the spambots were sailing past it anyway.
OK, if I am right, then that seems like an awful lot of work evaluating noobs who are almost certainly 99.9% spammers.
Why not have some sort of mechanism for the stragglers who want to post because they think they have found a new home among kindred souls simply send up the bat signal (I'm too old and tired to find a gif a bat signal but if someone wants to post one I will certainly sanction it). Perhaps some sort of email address that all the admins have access to and the first here can vet the noob.
My guess is spammers will either ignore the bat signal or spam the hell out of it just like everything else.
Not to hijack the thread but twitter spammers are the worse kind of annoying I usually just block them. TwitBlock is pretty useful for this purpose. Maybe there is a similar kind of thing for forums.
Yeah, what I've done is add the stopforumspam plugin that checks their email addresses and such, but not the one that allows us to report (yet.) This means that if they've been seen and reported as spammers before by other forums, they'll be blocked here. This will mean that some slip through, but it seems that it's probably knocking out a good 90% of them before we have to see them. It's possible for us to tune the values of what's considered spam, for now I've left it as the default. If we still feel we're getting too many we can lower the thresholds.
Comments
Why not have some sort of mechanism for the stragglers who want to post because they think they have found a new home among kindred souls simply send up the bat signal (I'm too old and tired to find a gif a bat signal but if someone wants to post one I will certainly sanction it). Perhaps some sort of email address that all the admins have access to and the first here can vet the noob.
My guess is spammers will either ignore the bat signal or spam the hell out of it just like everything else.
Not to hijack the thread but twitter spammers are the worse kind of annoying I usually just block them. TwitBlock is pretty useful for this purpose. Maybe there is a similar kind of thing for forums.
I defer to GP, especially if he is willing to do the work
I just deleted another applicant that had the "blah|blah|blah|....." string.
Earlier today I think it was 4 or 5.
Yes, a lot less than what it was before.
If I am viewing a thread and somebody comments in it I get a little popup box that tells me who commented and which thread they commented in.
Nice