Spam

[PatrickZ]

I see a lot of spam posts here on the forums lately, seems like the spam protection doesn't work good enough.

Of course I understand it's difficult to fight spam. On another forum where I'm a moderator we switch to manual activation of new accounts if the spam problem gets out of hand. If the spammers are gone we switch to auto-activation again, until the spammers discover it again. While this is not the most user-friendly system in the world it seems to work. Maybe that's an idea for here too.

[horst18519]

Patrick, you're right. Unfortunately, as this is a support forum and a lot of users are or will be registering to report an urgent issue it doesn't make sense to activate accounts or posts by moderators. We clean the forums daily though and immediately ban the users involved. We also have an anti bot registration working very well, the remaining spam seems to be from human spammers, I guess this must be the most stupid hobby in the world.

[FunnyFlyer]

But I think Patrick has a point here. I just signed up here and I was a member immediately without even clicking a mailed link.

I just reported two spam posts. If I can register here so easy spammers can too, it doesn't even check if the e-mail address is correct. You can enter anything as e-mail address and it just works.

[PatrickZ]

It occurs to me that lots of these spam messages are about lotteries. Perhaps it's possible to add the word "lottery" to the list of forbidden words. After all, it's something that has nothing to do with flight simulation so why would anyone use that word in a normal conversation?

[horst18519]

I had the same thought right now, but spam seems to come in waves in fact. If you find a solution for a certain sort, the next wave will hit you anyway. We're currently looking for a better way to prevent it in the first place, we'll get there eventually...