Life In 19x19

FYI - the following "members" are clearly spam:

22 BusinessOnlineBlog
23 Unurroumekkek
24 Emowwoume
25 dogeilletrilt
26 twettyrhymn
27 Joumbamimit

Thank you, they're gonzo. I hope nobody minds me taking the liberty of banning a few spammers.

Please, ban away. I loath spammers. There are other suspicious member names with 0 posts but no websites associated with them. As we all know, this was a problem with the reconstituted GD and the reason Don shut down new registrations. I don't know how to combat it other than keeping watch. Perhaps a spam patrol? Someone's got to keep the streets clean.

phpbb is pretty good at blocking spam.

And if we didn't have spammers what would our moderators do in such a tranquil community?

Maybe a captcha of some sort could be implemented in the registration somehow? Even better if it's Go related (not sure the atari captcha that Alexander Dinerchtein uses for his sites is necessarily good though).

There is a captcha, but I don't think it's a very strong one (don't know why they don't just use reCaptcha). Actually, I think using a go-oriented captcha like Alexander Dinerchtein's sites to would defeat a lot of them. Most are not going to trouble themselves with learning the rules of go when there are a few million other forums they could spam with less effort.

one of the arguements for the go captcha is what if a noob is trying to register?

i don't think that would be much of an issue but it has been argued before.

Have you seen the go captcha? There's a stone in atari, and it asks where to play to capture. They're super simple, and anyone that knows the rules should get them, I think.

Yeah, spam is just one of those annoyances that is part of the interwebs package, unfortunately. I also think it's a mistake to make it so cumbersome to register that you effectively cure the disease by killing the patient. We have enough people to keep watch and mods to ban anyway.

As you said Jordus, the mods have to earn their pay somehow

Jordus wrote:one of the arguements for the go captcha is what if a noob is trying to register?

i don't think that would be much of an issue but it has been argued before.

We could use a ladder captcha; isn't it said, after all, that "if you don't know ladders, don't play Go."?