This forum has such a major spam problem, it's barely usable. Is there some other forum elsewhere that I'm missing? It feels fairly pointless posting here, knowing it will be drowned in a sea of rubbish.

Could the registration process be changed to use a more effective CAPTCHA? I've had success in the past maintaining a forum elsewhere by adding a simple question and answer to the registration process; You could have something like "What does the second letter stand for in RDBMS?". That technique completely fixed my spam problem.

Regards,
Ben.

This is extremely painful for us too. We are looking at alternatives but so far we have not found a solution that was addressing our requirements. Proposal very welcome.

BTW, this forum is a high enough target that actual human answer the CAPTCHA. Making it harder won't solve the problem.

Thanks for the reply, Emmanuel.

I take the point that the high profile nature of the Hibernate forum changes the situation. The forum I was maintaining was very low profile and probably not worth of any significant effort on the spammers' part.

It's a while since I registered here, so I can't remember exactly what that process looked like. Specifically, I can't recall whether I was instantly granted access or it required manual approval. If you don't already have manual approval, then perhaps that's worth considering. Perhaps the registration should require you to 'apply' for membership, where you have to write a paragraph describing your interest in Hibernate. As a new user, it would be frustrating, but I think most legitimate users would be willing to jump through a few hoops and wait a day or so for their membership to be approved if they were made aware of the spam problem up front. Perhaps even then it wouldn't be foolproof, but it might help. Perhaps it would be worth trying it out.

Cheers,
Ben.

That's an interesting suggest, maybe we should try that. I'm not sure if I can recognize a spammer from his email though? Risk is that it creates more work without solving the problem, but I'm willing to try anything.

Another thing I'd like to try is to have new accounts require approval for posts, that would kill the motivation for spammers as no ad would ever get published. People who have been posting since a while would earn a status to not need pre-approval.

Unfortunately such changes imply we seek to change the forum software and work on a migration plan; we tried to avoid such a task but personally I'd say we can't wait much longer.

I spend approximately 15 minutes every day to remove spam; but obviously I can't do it every single day. I'd love to spend such time to actually answer some questions.

I don't think this is going to work, most of the time the email is from Yahoo ... but again, I'm willing as well to try anything

[quote]Another thing I'd like to try is to have new accounts require approval for posts, that would kill the motivation for spammers as no ad would ever get published. People who have been posting since a while would earn a status to not need pre-approval.[quote]

That would be nice

[quote]I spend approximately 15 minutes every day to remove spam; but obviously I can't do it every single day. I'd love to spend such time to actually answer some questions.[quote]

I try to remove all the spam every morning but it feels like a lost battle.