I'm really starting to get annoyed with the periodic spam on this board. Is there any way to augment the usual authentication mechanisms with a captcha? That would at least eliminate the automated account sign-ups and drive-by postings.

When I got on Rob Finch's processor-design Yahoo forum, I felt like I had to apply, present a resumé, and write an essay to prove I wasn't there to vandalize the forum. It was probably unrealistic that I should feel so much scrutiny (especially since Rob Finch probably already knew who I was), but I didn't really mind and it was nice to know that anyone else who was there had a good reason for being there. OTOH, if someone were new to µP's and were genuinely interested but knew just barely enough to ask a relevant question, I wouldn't want to discourage them.

Maybe a big sign on the membership sign-up page could just let them know up front that we won't let our forum be ruined by spam (like the 6502 Yahoo forum was), and any they leave will be removed within hours if not minutes and they will be shown the door.

I wish there were a way to prosecute these vandals-- something like how our phone number is on the do-not-call list for sales calls. After the list was put in place, I reported every sales call to www.donotcall.gov, probably resulting in some of those $11,000 fines, and they quit. I haven't gotten any in months, until last week. I reported that one too. It takes something drastic to make these people understand that we're serious.

Sorry, you puzzled me. What spam? I nearly every day visit this forum but I cannot remember any message not related to the 6502. Or did I miss something?

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It was taken care of pretty quickly. I check for new messages here quite a few times a day (which just takes a second with the forum index being on my toolbar), and have seen ads for drugs, porn, casinos, hotels, cellphones, iPods, dating services, sunglasses, music downloads, loans, etc.. I remember last year someone was even asking about a good place to buy flowers in a town in Russia. His post was removed, and he came back and posted again, it was removed again, and then I guess he got the idea.

After seeing a wave of about one spam per day for the last two weeks on this forum, I'm left thinking maybe the forum should be set up so a new member's first post would be filtered by the moderators for validity. (Mike, is that possible?) The new user would not even show up in the members' list until their first post was accepted. I say that because some people obviously sign up just to give their non-6502-related website publicity through their personal profile, or advertise right there. They usually get deleted.

Sounds good there. This spamming stuff gets too darned ridiculous. Need an ip ban as well for these bozo types. One spam, BOOM out the door!

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

The problem is that banning is useless.

I work in the Internet industry, and I can't tell you how many times we get an account signed up, then two days later a report of spam comes in and we shut the account down. Two days. That's it. And these are for small-time spammers.

So, after two days, our IPs get blacklisted, but the spammer has meanwhile likely opened up at least two other accounts on two other ISPs. In the mean time, we need to spend weeks getting our IPs off the blacklists because, after all, the more they get blacklisted, the more likely we're going to be spammers, right?! So why should they unblacklist us? Note that every ISP smaller than AOL has to go through this bullcrap. The bigger ISPs just pay the blacklists to conveniently ignore them. Unfortunately, we cannot afford this approach.

So, what are you going to do, blacklist the whole Internet? Not practical.

What's needed is a means that effectively prevents automated messaging to occur, thus requiring human intervention. That takes labor, and labor costs a hell of a lot more than the $0.03/kWh of electricity it takes to actually send massive blast of spam. This is the point of the captchas.

However, many spammers make enough cash to cover the cost of human labor. So now the trick is to actually make it absolutely difficult for a human to be able to successfully deposit a message. Garth's idea of manual message filtering is a good example of this approach.

One or the other, or preferably both, can result in a significant reduction in the amount of spam that we message board users see.

The disadvantage, however, is that now Mike has to weed through a whole lot more spam messages. It's of course up to him, but as 6502.org isn't a commercial venture for him that I'm aware of, it seems to me that the additional administrative load may not be in his best interests.