Attention!!! Attention!!! Attention!!!

[Lyn Chase]

Attention please!!!  We are being inundated by bots attempting to join so they can post spam here.  Today I have 56 "members"  awaiting my "approval".  It appears that NONE of them are human.  I'm tired of wasting my time to go through them trying to determine if any of them are legitimate, so here is the plan:
   If you are a guest and really WANT to become a member of this forum so you can read and post here, please send me an e-mail expressing your interest.  Please explain why you want to post ie., you are a former player, you are interested in learning more about the game, etc.
  You can send your e-mail to news (at) spiritwars (dot) com.

Another bit of frustrating news:  When Eric and I purchased an e-mail marketing product from GoDaddy, we were somewhat misled.  It appears that they sent out only 23 e-mails out of the 10,000 we had attempted to send.  We will now try to send out a few hundred every day or two...UNLESS...any of you have a suggestion that Eric and I can deal with.  Eric is busy with school and I cannot even use the correct terminology to discuss all this stuff.

A third bit of frustrating news:  The programmer that we started talking to is not able to help us at this time.  He is a lovely young man but just cannot take on a project of this proportion.  We will press on.....
                                                Lyn   (aka Mom)

[Neo Pain]

I asked some friends (that run sites) about some of the bot problems that I have seen here and here are some replies I got from them.

to register for the forum is there some bot test? like a visual thing? is there an email check?

that'll keep out many bots but really some spammers are persistent so you have to ban some emails and ip ranges too. it's a constant battle really.

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It's difficult to prevent, because as Ontain said some are very persistent.  They will sometimes use a captcha solving service (think distributed captcha solving) or monitor it themselves while running these mass signup services. 

An easy win is to implement at least a basic captcha, that will catch many of the automated signups.  Another way is to use some of the more innovative/obscure ones out there that require you to draw or solve some sort of problem/quiz question.

Here's a list of some decent ones out there: http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/freebies/captcha-solutions-kill-spam/

If it's a game driven site, you may even consider some of the more silly/fun ones like http://www.securitystronghold.com/products/ironclad-captcha/?product_tab=example

One more option I forgot about, is put a hidden field into the form.  Humans won't see it and won't fill it out, but a bot will attempt to fill it out and submit the form.  You can then do a post check to see if the hidden field has a value, if it does then you can reject the submission.

If you have any other questions dealing with site management etc if you want I will ask him about it. He is pretty knowledgeable and doesn't mind helping with what he can.

[Jakers]

It's been 10 years since I was a member here.  Back then I went by "KiTar.  I've been trying to install but when I click on the SW icon I get an error "spiritwars.exe"  I've downloaded it at least 4 or 5 times, installing it every time. But the same error comes up EVERY TIME.
Please, Please, Please help.  I need my Spiritwars fix.  ; p

[Neo Pain]

That game is not up yet unfortunately. Lyn is working on getting a programmer to rebuild the game.