Spam and forum explosion

[Catherine]

The Form number suggested for a security question seems like it might be easily determined by the spammers.

Not by a bot!  Those are the huge majority of spammer sources.

[Eric]

As Catherine said, simple questions like that tend to be better at fooling automated "bots" which are are much more efficient at making a big mess than a real person. 

 

You are right though, most people who are manually creating accounts and spamming forums are able to google most questions to find the answers.  This is where the new spam detection service comes in.  Our forum connects to the service for every single new user registration to check them against a database of reported spammers.  Every user who registers gets a score of 1-4... the higher up on the scale, the more likely they are a spammer.  Anyone with a score of 1 or 2 is allowed in (as long as they can answer the security question)

 

Any user who gets a score of 3 is held in a queue for me to decide if they are allowed in or not.

Any user who gets a score of 4 is allowed to register, but then is automatically banned from the site.

 

If any spammers do get through and start spamming, I or the Mods will mark them as spammers, and that information is sent to the central database for the service.  As you can imagine, with tens or hundreds of thousands of forums constantly reporting spammers, the service becomes quite robust.