Sorry for the SPAM

[Fred]

Hi everyone. Those who follow this forum probably got some notifications lately about some spammy posts. When you clicked the notification links those posts might have been already deleted, or not.

Actually it was some spammer in Ukraine. Not sure it was a bot but if it was, it managed to bypass Google's recaptcha and even my Q&A method. I had to block an IP range that affected a big area in Ukraine through .htaccess. So this may affect many genuine Ukrainian users bu I could not find any other effective solution.

Sorry for any inconvenience. We (I and Bill) try to keep the forum as clean as possible but sometimes it's hard.

[Muhammad Tasneem]

When I moderate some warez forum, I used to bypass this kind of security.

You can find the many scripts to bypass recaptcha specially for Firefox and Chrome.

One of a good practice to avoid this type of stuff (other than IP block) is Trusted User.

Only trusted users can post directly, non trusted user's posts waiting for admin/moderator approval.

Trusted users craitera define in many ways, like:

• Choose manually.
  Number of posts.
  How long user's registration.
  Depend on user's license/purchase type.

[Fred]

Thanks, Muhammad. Is the forum you moderate PhpBB?

[Muhammad Tasneem]

No.
it was old but I don't remember the name. before I left the warez (I was too old to meet the speed) they upgraded to xenforo.

[wmmiller]

Spammers. They are like flies. They just want to get in.