Regarding the spammers

[Rai Avon-El]

Is there any way, beyond manually completing people's registrations, that could get us rid of those awful spammers? Like a "Are you human" box?

[Allot]

[Stamp of Annoyance]
*squiggle*

[Oroigawa Koreyasu]

Peculiarly, I believe there is a captcha box (or whatever that's called with the letters), which is almost impossible for bots to override.

[Ari Rahikkala]

The phpbb3 captcha isn't "almost impossible". http://www.darkseoprogramming.com/2008/ ... uper-easy/ presents some simple preprocessing steps to make the text quite readable for an OCR program, and it seems to have been in the news in several places that the phpbb3 captcha was cracked (presumably meaning that a solver was written and made widely available) a couple of months ago. I haven't been looking at the addresses, but I suspect someone recently sicced a botnet armed with that solver on to the task of spamming phpBB boards.

I have an idea about how to perhaps solve this... well, I had an idea years ago, and will reimplement it now that there's a point in doing so...

[Oroigawa Koreyasu]

Ah...bollocks...

[Allot]

Go, Ari, go!

Hurry, or I'll write you a SuperAri song to go with your Carmen Sandiego anthem.