As far as it seems from the recently increased spam volume on the groups site and drupal.org itself, I would recommend that a simple math based captcha should be set up on user registrations, so automatic registrations are at least tried to be prevented.

I was fixing this issue: http://drupal.org/node/136340 (spam on a groups.drupal.org node), where out of the 26 comments, 10 were spam (and one was asking for those spams to get removed). Even an innocent looking "Its good to see some of you guys stay in touch. I just wish you all the best." post was submitted by a spammer account.

Now it is clear that there should be some automated filter on new user account creation to at least try to prevent this.

Comments

moshe weitzman’s picture

moshe weitzman commented

i used to have math captcha on groups. the bots got past it, and it didn't work on first submission. our captcha module was/is buggy. groups site has been using an abolutely custom question on its registration page. logout and go to bottom of http://groups.drupal.org/user/register. and i *still* get spam. my conclusion (for g.d.o) is that these are real people, and not bots.

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented
Component: Spam » Redesign

I expected there would be a more recent issue on this but not finding any. g.d.o already uses mollom but d.o doesn't. Moving this to consideration in the redesign. Also note that there are conversations regarding the spam problem in http://drupal.org/node/300010 and http://drupal.org/node/263688 though they aren't really outright dupes of this.

Michelle

drumm’s picture

drumm
he/him
Location NY, US
commented
Component: Redesign » Spam

Still part of spam, not redesign.

silverwing’s picture

silverwing commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Closing this issue as CAPTCHAs are generally frowned upon by site maintainers and other forms of spam prevention is being worked on.