Banning accounts registering from gmail.com?

[Tank Program]

I've just been going through the member accounts, weeding out spam accounts, and it seems a lot of the recent ones are using gmail.com, so I'm thinking of banning it. Any comments?

[hoop]

are you thinking of banning just new or all accounts using gmail?

[Monkey]

I use gmail and I would guess that many others do too, including new people. When it comes to the stage of banning the world's biggest email providers, I think that it's time to come up with a better solution.

If you are talking about bots spamming then an intelligent captcha should do the trick.

If you mean people actually registering and spamming, and if it happens too often to ban individual accounts, then a captcha with questions about armagetron should weed out the non-armagetron spammers (not as hard as the wiki cycle colour question). That just leaves arma-player spammers. If IP banning fails due to them using open proxies then install an open proxy scanner. If that still fails then have a "report spam" button on/near every post that can only be used by a list of trusted users. The trusted users list should be decided by you and I would recommend that it should include all users that have posted some sensible posts. You can then remove anyone from that list that clicks on it when they should not have. If all that fails then just ban us all.

[Z-Man]

It's a bad idea to treat gmail separately. Spammers use it because it has been spambot free for a while, so many admins put gmail on whitelists; but now that their captcha seems to be broken, that's no longer the case.

Arma-specific captcha's won't work too well. People registering here are likely to be new users lacking the knowledge to answer them. But perhaps something simple? Show a screenshot with one cycle on it, ask whether it's driving to the left or right, and that 9 times?

[hoop]

Show a screenshot with one cycle on it, ask whether it's driving to the left or right

haha nice but, well, I bet someone would answer wrongly being sure that the cycle is following that coloured wall

I believe it would work, as Monkey said, giving someone the possibility to ban those users, or at least to remove the posts. I personally (and I guess many others) visit "View new posts since last visit" very frequently, and I've always recognized those who were spamming.

[Lucifer]

How about a "Name that program" captcha? So you have to have seen tron to be able to register here.

[Z-Man]

I believe it would work, as Monkey said, giving someone the possibility to ban those users, or at least to remove the posts. I personally (and I guess many others) visit "View new posts since last visit" very frequently, and I've always recognized those who were spamming.

I use that, too, but the recently active spambots always trick me into thinking they're just very dumb humans

A "No http link in signature/profile until you have at least 10 posts" policy may also help. Or better, no signature at all until you have 10 posts. First time posters with a wall of "witty" quotes in their signature kind of annoy me anyway.

[Tank Program]

There have been a lot more recent spam accounts from gmail than msn or yahoo. Odd.

A 10 post limit in the signature/url doesn't stop spam accounts from still registering. Only difference is you can't tell they're spam accounts, they simply never get used is all.

A new captcha would be ideal, but I don't want one that can be brute forced some how. Only left or right... Not sure how a spam bot could do it but I bet they could.

[Lucifer]

reCAPTCHA



(for real! I wish I could say it worked on craigslist, but that's also a really high traffic site)