Anal Only Lifestyle Forum

Why?

It is not for every post, it's for the first few posts by each new user, to filter out spammers. After the first few have been approved manually, all future posts can be made without manual approval.

Got it!

Thanks!

We had lots of bulgarian (?) spams lately, that's why this has been done.

Could you make the approval clear on the main page? I've seen lots of member (real i think) trying to post messages and they may not realize. If they have trouble posting maybe they wont come back.

Honestly, right now I'm a bit overwhelmed with spam. There are about 2,000 spam messages in the queue and I'm going to have to go through and pick out the legitimate messages (if any) and delete the rest. I'd like to delete all the spam accounts as well, but there are so many of those as well.

If you want some help, just say it.

There should be some kind of antispam, for example a question only a human could answer. A simple question will work - something like "Please name the color of snow", where the answer of course will be "white". I have used that with success on guestbooks and other form based webpages with 100% success
Most of the spam comes from spamservers with no humans involved in the process of creating the users and messages.

Sorry to hear. It sounds like a huge task

Have you read this https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtop ... &t=2122696 ?

That list of members keeps getting bigger everytime i logon but never any new members posts. I wish they could fix it.

The massive queue full of spam has been cleared and all members who had never logged in since registration or ever posted anything have been deleted. This unfortunately will probably have deleted a few legitimate users as well, but given that there were literally thousands of spam accounts with a few legitimate ones mixed in, it's a lot easier for legitimate users still interested in the site to sign up again (and no one who ever posted any legitimate posts to the site got deleted).

I've also changed the signup question/answer setup a bit in an attempt to deter autoregistration—we'll see if it helps.

Edit: So far so good—not a single spam signup since changing from a CAPTCHA to a custom Q&A. If it gets exploited in the future, it's easy enough to just change the questions.