Spambot influx

[teanndaorsa]

The eagle-eyed amongst you might have noticed a few spam posts going up, this appears to be an isolated attack from a single source but is evading the spam filters. So, sadly, for now posts from new members (those who've never posted before) will have to go into an approval queue before they'll show up. Sorry to those genuine new members to the site for the inconvenience, we haven't had to do it this way for a while now. 

[Eido]

Thanks for your continued vigilance.

[teanndaorsa]

Okay, so the flood appears to have subsided and the CleanTalk plugin is taking care of the remainder, so I'm relaxing the first post restriction again. I've also removed the (largely ineffective) IP-address based bans which were causing some innocent real users to have issues. There are still some restrictions on email services which are not permitted (mostly .ru mail servers of various types) but these days IP addresses are recycled so often there's a lot of address sharing that makes it a scattershot approach to blocking spammers at best.

[teanndaorsa]

Annoyingly, there appears to have been a subtle incursion over the last little while that I failed to properly notice: new accounts created with URLs to products in their signature, making vacuous posts on various topics so that their links would appear. There were some obvious ones that got reported (thanks to those who noticed), but some where, surprisingly, they were actually replying to the topic in question. Frankly that is a level of engagement from spammers as terrifying as that moment in The Walking Dead where the walkers suddenly showed the ability to climb fences.

Anyway, some of them might still be floating around, but as a broader defense against this tactic, I have disabled the use of the 'url' tag in signatures. Unfortunately this will also be applied to legitimate community members who had URL links in their signature, sorry about that. Those URLs will still be visible so people can visit them if they want, but it won't be as productive for the spammers to use this tactic any more.