***Bot invasion on the forums***

[Konrad]

How about just preventing urls from being clickable until you've earned your custom title thing with posts/rep.

Nobody will ever visit a spamsite if they have to actually manually copy&paste the link text into their address bar. Traffic to the spammer site should be reduced to ~1 hit, only because the mods confirm before spamban. Consequently (one can hope) the spammer will move on to more lucrative sites rather than waste time here.

[AmEv]

Figure out how to either completely remove or un-parse random links/pix until X posts, then after the point, re-parse them for sanity's sake.

Make it so the pix in the modding section work, though.

[Airbozo]

I am checking into it now, but there is a site that lists the emails spammers use to register on forums with and there is a way to parse this info. If there was a way for forum software to parse this list before allowing registration, that would help. We could always just send out a ton of emails to the offending email account and flood their inbox....

[AmEv]

You did take a look at stopforumspam.com, right?

[TLHarrell]

Found another. Ban sameeoi3794 http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/f...er.php?u=14404

Three posts, all links to Air Jordan shoes.

[Omega]

How about just preventing urls from being clickable until you've earned your custom title thing with posts/rep.

Nobody will ever visit a spamsite if they have to actually manually copy&paste the link text into their address bar. Traffic to the spammer site should be reduced to ~1 hit, only because the mods confirm before spamban. Consequently (one can hope) the spammer will move on to more lucrative sites rather than waste time here.

I can tell you from my experience at least that we don't click or look at the links. Spambots are usually really easy to spot, big block paragraphs, links to irrelevant things, names with random assortments of letters, etc...

Besides, who knows what kind of nasty viruses could be on some of those sites. I certainly don't take my chances and I would imagine nobody else here would either.

[BuzzKillington]

Give out magical powers to a anti-spam squad that bans obvious spammers. If they have too many false positives, revoke magic powers.

[AmEv]

That'll look nice. A nice little icon can of spam above the Rep bar, to say we're an official spam fighter.

[TLHarrell]

Put a button at the bottom of a post of anybody with less than 25 posts to their name. People can then auto-report for banning with a simple click.

[Neodymium]

Bot invasion on bot invasion topic itself?