I believe this forum would benefit greatly from the reCaptcha plugin that ships with phpBB 3.2.

fluke wrote:

I believe this forum would benefit greatly from the reCaptcha plugin that ships with phpBB 3.2.

Is this running 3.2? That's the latest version, right? I think this forum is on an older version. Not all plugins are backward compatible. I've been visiting the forums since 2011, when 3.0 was the current release (it was released in 2007, and 3.1 was released in 2014). I don't recall any major updates to the forum, although I could've missed it. So, my guess is 3.0 (HTML page source doesn't indicate that I can tell).

But, yeah, something needs to be done.

I thought previous to phpBB 3.2 that PHP 7.1 wasn't supported.  Now that PHP 5 is beyond end of life, they really should be migrating everything to the latest version.

fluke wrote:

I thought previous to phpBB 3.2 that PHP 7.1 wasn't supported.  Now that PHP 5 is beyond end of life, they really should be migrating everything to the latest version.

It would be great if they do upgrade, or otherwise implement suggestions such as what you mentioned. I'm uncertain how effecting anything will be regarding the one-offs that are posted. I'm not sure much of the spam is bots vs how much is grunt work by lower tier spammers. Whatever it is, I hope your suggestion helps, if they can deploy it.

The phpBB forum at cleantalk.org seems to be oddly free of spam. I have never used their product but it sounds like it is designed to also take care of grunt work one-off posters.  The lack of creativity in word choice in the latest spam wave seems to suggest to me that a Bayesian filter should be effective against the current spam.

Let me offer that while there is still some spam from the weekend (including, as I write this, one post in this thread) the amount is way down from the levels of the last several weeks. Whether that's because of spammers taking a break, more Roku mod online time, improved anti-spam processes, or what, I can't say. But it is nice to see the levels near where we would like to see them.

My abandoned hope is no longer abandoned. It and I are cuddling now.