Camera Talk

new user

robertowest

is no longer a new user.he is an ex user. he's not peining for the fjords.he has passed on.
user has been ban hammered
-mod

Our autumn festival of spammers at Camera-wiki has dried up, for now at least. Maybe the cold weather did for them, or maybe they ran out of un-blocked IP addresses, or maybe someone identified them and their ISP got rid of them. I can't believe they carried on as long as they did for the brief exposure any of their spam got on our site. Either we were a vanishingly unimportant part of their list of targets, or they weren't bothering to check their success.

Unfortunately, I don't think spammers ever quit, and neither does the fight to keep against them.

I'm glad to hear that Camera-wiki has gotten a reprieve - even if it's only temporary. That is a wonderful resource.

A Q&A challenge Captcha executed properly can block almost 100% of spambots. I think it's 100%, but I couldn't guarantee it.

It won't block human spammers, but those are so easy to pick off, and they don't return.

On my other project, I have a Q&A challenge, and it has blocked nearly 600 spambot registration attempts since July. And the site isn't even public.

With a Q&A challenge, you have to make it easy for a human but impossible for a spambot to decipher through a Google search. Spambots can take your question and execute a Google search and then fill in the answer. And spambot programmers defeated the image Captcha long ago - even when humans can't decipher it.

The word "telephone" trips up nearly all spambots, because they try to fill in a telephone number. Some people are using hidden fields in a form. A spambot will fill in the field, automatically invalidating the entry but making it seem that it was successful.

Somehow, my e-mail address became public when I migrated to the new hosting contract, and every day I now get fake invoices and promos for "little blue pills."

I have come to view those behind this activity as criminals and terrible human beings who contribute nothing to human society.

Keep up the fight. What you are doing on Camera-wiki is terrific.

"Pala" is a big, fat spammer and has been sent to spam land.