It seems that forums are being spammed big time, everywhere. I heard on the L’Arc forum, that the spam problem is not something I’m only dealing with from the last 4 weeks but it’s everywhere. Past 4 weeks have been a massive out break of some sort. There’s absolutely no way of stopping them anymore except ‘approval by admin’. That’s not a 100% failsafe, and you can actually deny users you want in because they picked names that remind you of spam.

So far I’ve been getting 30-40 approval requests: all spam accounts, every single day. I get those mails in and forward them directly to my trash bin. No more spamming my forum. Once every two days I check in, check the usernames, and thrash all that are suspicious. CAPCHA isn’t effective anymore, banning isn’t effective because there’s nothing fixed to check on, and so on.

Maybe, just maybe if you ban Russia, Latvia, Ukraine and the whole set of countries in that area your spam will decreased dramatically. They’ll find other IPs though, outside these countries.

I did a recent cleanup of user accounts on this blog too. We can thank the lord AKISMET is so effective because you’d have a major major problem if this wasn’t the case. Not only that, but to run WordPress spam free, you need to approve ‘at first comment’. So they can make user accounts as many as they’d like as long as they don’t get an approved first comment they can’t spam. It’s the only way these days. Wargh! What a pests. Vermin!

I ended up deleting hundreds and hundreds of users on this blog that were merely spammers and I see at least 1-2 registering each day.