[CentOS-devel] URGENT: Website and fora at risk due to automated spammer account creation

On 09/14/2011 05:44 PM, Phil Schaffner wrote:
> http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=5105

> Proposed approach:
> 
> 1. Implement some automated way of deleting accounts as described above.
> 2. Implement captcha or some other mechanism in the account creation 
> process to foil the bots.
> 

I guess that someone with access to the machine and the corresponding
mysql db/tables can do that, assuming that such 'research' has to be
done to know what to delete from the xoops db ...
I don't know if captcha is available for that old xoops version. What i
did for the fr.centos.org forum (using captcha by default) was also to
moderate the first post of every new user : spammers not seeing their
posts appearing on the forum stop to post (i guess the bot does a check
and stop after several attempts). That means that the moderator (me) has
to check the first post of each new user, but that's safer and easier
than having to deal with millions of posts from autogenerated accounts

Fabian