Bots and Spam

[Mirnus]

As mentioned in Britain's thread, the site is virtually dead for the time being.
I check this place every day with what little access to internet I have, and 90% of the new posts and users are spam bots.

I am reopening a proposition for security purposes since these bots are getting smarter (i.e. mimicking users while promoting their spam via hyperlinks).
I will guarantee that these bots are made of scrambled text emails...(i.e. asevvw142vs3@yahoo.com)...that are just rooted for spamming purposes.
My proposition before, when the spamming first started around a year ago, was to create a email confirmation system where it would eliminate most forms of bot from ever making it into the site.
Now since I was here long before the updates in security and site maintenance, I'm not entirely sure how far you guys go with security anymore, but it's clear just through looking through the newest additions to the user area that a gross majority of new users are bots. Most names even have bad hiding tactics like posting what they spam as their name.

http://debate-central.ncpa.org/forum/us ... rch=Submit

"debtsettlement"
"jumbobottlesbgr"
"cherryhillauto"
"leadershipbook"
"cynthiamarekrca"

Those are just 5 random ones out of the first 20. They're clearly spam accounts and the ones that have posted post for one session, never log back in, and all of their posts have signatures with hyperlinks to their spam/phishing sites.

So: new security measures need to be set up unless you want to come back in a while when activity picks up again to find that every single forum has been decimated with spam.

Also: users, you need to be aware of these spammers. They need reported so the account is gone. There are just now over 10000 members here. When I started there was about 1200. Before the spam invasions, there was around 2000. The last time I checked, with all inactive accounts taken in, there were around 4000. I remember when the spam got really bad this place was up around 15000 at one point. You guys are getting spam bombed....bad.

[Mirnus]

Since I posted this, a notable point has been shown.

When I started to post this thread at 4:30 PM, there were 10223 members.
Now, at 9:15 PM, there are 10280 members.
That's 57 new members in 4 hours and 45 minutes.
You know how many of those are spam accounts?
At least 55 of them. (A couple of them have a small potential of being anything other than spam accounts)

EDIT: Now it is 4 days later. (April 18) The number of users? 11514.
That's nearly 1300 members in roughly 93 hours.

I don't believe I have to say much else about how big this problem is.