Isn’t it terrible when a few unscrupulous individuals ruin things for the rest of us?
The reason the original Geek/Talk faded into obscurity in the late noughties was because the onslaught of spam made moderation a huge time consumer, with little benefit to the community as a whole.
I re-launched the site on a new platform, purging years of old content, in order to start with a blank slate and to drive this supportive, growth-focused community forward into a new era. Weirdly enough, even after years of being offline, the same spammers (who have long promoted our forum as one to target) were back at it almost immediately. I blocked hundreds of IPs, hundreds of email domains, and yet they persisted. I experimented with various tweaks to registration settings, including requiring email validation and captcha solutions, and yet the spam continued. Over Christmas, I blocked all new signups. Thinking things may have returned to normality, I re-opened signups in mid January, and sadly, within hours I’d received close to 100 new member registrations – all from SEO spammers.
I’m looking into what else we can do to combat this terrible group, who have made the community virtually impossible to operate with the limited time I have available. While I investigate other options, Geek/Talk is closed to new member registrations.
I apologize for the inconvenience and hope that we’ll be back soon. If any of you have operated bbPress forums and have hot tips for how to avoid this style of abuse (which seems to be from actual humans, not bots, but humans with bad intentions), please let me know.
