I think people underestimate just how industrial and financially driven the spam business is. Spammers go to work every day just like the rest of us. Getting around anti spam measures is their job. If there's money to be made in them generating thousands of disposable email addresses (trivially easy), or automated delay timers (to get round 'can't post for _x_ days' protocols) they will.
The only thing to do is to put in the time and effort to making their lives just that much less profitable, and their businesses that much less viable.
I'm an (abominably lazy) admin at Camera-wiki. We are a small site, but were developing a large spam problem for our size; enough that most of what the admins were doing on the site was deleting spam and blocking spammers, instead of researching or writing for the wiki. There was little satisfaction or pleasure left in being involved in the site.
A large fraction of our spammers were usernames which conformed to a standard pattern, clearly generated by a program from a list of possible human names. One thing we started doing was deleting any usernames that fitted that pattern, before they spammed. I guess some of that work might have been done for us if we had the knowledge to sign up to something like Spam-o-matic as you have here. Certainly, the stats quoted on the front page here suggest it's a very worthwhile measure.
Also, we have a Bot that puts a welcome message on a new user's Talk page; we started having one of the admins add a second message, which said in polite terms 'Welcome, but write something soon or get blocked', and after a short while, we went back and did that. Otherwise, we were building up a long membership list of spammers' spare usernames, which couldn't ever be used, because they'd been generated from an IP address that had been used for spamming, but their existence offended our ideas of tidiness (and if the IP blocks had ever been lost, we'd have been in deep do-do, I guess).
Still, as Halford says, the spammers don't notice what we do or care about it, and they kept on registering. What we have done in the end is disable new registrations. People wanting to edit in the wiki have to contact an admin (via another site even, since you can't use the wiki's 'mail this user' feature until you're registered!). We have registered only two new users in several months since that change; but spam has ceased.
It seems to me your systems work. I only see a few spam posts per week myself, and the few I've reported were gone in a few minutes. I doubt LFPF is getting significant traffic to the spammers' links, and I doubt they spend those few minutes gloating over their presence here; it's pointless to spend our time fuming about it.
I'm a moderator at www.PracticalMachinist.com
With over 10.6 million unique visitors in the past year, it's the world's largest website devoted to the machinist trade and related manufacturing subjects.
We have no visible spam problem that I've ever seen. I'll try to find out why not.
- Leigh
If you believe you can, or you believe you can't... you're right.
If the forum software allowed for text-based scanning software to process each post before actually posting it, some very simple text and regular expression matching algorithms could probably filter out 95% of the traditional spammers who keep hitting this forum. Scanning scripts written in Javascript, Python or even PHP could handle this quite simply, and it wouldn't matter how many fake registrations the spammers use, because the scanner would look at the contents of what they try to post, not the registrant's name or email address. I would be surprised if current forum software didn't have such a capability built in. So that's a long way of suggesting that the forum software here may be too out of date to adequately handle this type of problem. Without the ability to build in some intelligence in the forum software, the problem with spammers will only get worse.
Retirement is hard to adjust to, takes a while. Took me years to even realize I was retired...
I wager Drew will be back...
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