• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

Fighting the spammers

arno

arno

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Recently there has been quite some activity from spammers on the forum. Sometimes they only register, but often they also try to post on the forums. Thanks to our very active moderators we are able to remove such users quite quickly, but they remain a little annoying.

In an attempt to reduce the trouble caused by them we have today banned two email domains for users who try to register. These two are mail.ru and gawab.com. Users that are already registered using these domain should not notice any trouble, else please let us know. If you are a genuine FS developer and want to register please use another email address.

We are also looking at other ways to fight the spammers, so there might be some more changes soon.
 
I own a non relevant forum and had this problem as well. We had around 300-400 spammers register over the course of 2 weeks. It turns out the spammers are all robots, and not actual people. I just added a question during the registration process. It has to be very simple, but require an intelligent response. You can try a simple math equation, like 5+5=.

I asked the user to type the first letter of the word AMERICAN into the box. They must type the letter "A", or "a" to get the question right and proceed with the registration. A spam robot can not read and understand the instructions. It worked flawlessly. I haven't had a single spam sign up in a few weeks now. If you'd like to do this simple solution, let me know and I'll write the instructions on how to do it. Thanks.
 
Thanks for the offer. We are looking at using Q&A as part of the registration process. We think the reason for the sudden increase in spammer registrations is that someone has found a way to deal with the CAPTCHA (letters in an image) on registration screens. Actually there are a number of outfits (mostly in India I think) who have teams of people cracking CAPTCHAs.

Instructions on how you did it would be helpful. Perhaps you could PM Arno or me?
 
We have now introduced a registration question that seems to be stopping the spamming registrations at the moment. We will monitor it for some days to see if it is going to hold them off in the longer term.
 
Another option would be to time the registration process, if you think that the time to create an account is too fast (taking into account legitimate automatic systems) then it's most likely a spammer bot.

Adding a separate Q&A question helps to differentiate the automatic account fillers, the time to read and actually fill it in can be timed.

To tighten it even further, you could ask a question that is related to flight sim development.

Have you looked into using recaptcha? www.recaptcha.net
 
Adding a separate Q&A question helps to differentiate the automatic account fillers, the time to read and actually fill it in can be timed.

To tighten it even further, you could ask a question that is related to flight sim development.
Click to expand...

That is what we have done. The question is related to Flight Simming

Have you looked into using recaptcha?
Click to expand...

Yes and no. We need to upgrade the software version on the forum and reCAPTCHA comes along with the latest version.
 
scruffyduck said:
Thanks for the offer. We are looking at using Q&A as part of the registration process. We think the reason for the sudden increase in spammer registrations is that someone has found a way to deal with the CAPTCHA (letters in an image) on registration screens. Actually there are a number of outfits (mostly in India I think) who have teams of people cracking CAPTCHAs.

Instructions on how you did it would be helpful. Perhaps you could PM Arno or me?
Click to expand...

The question and answer is what solved it for me. Robots can't follow specific instructions, simple as that. I see you added the question and answer, do you still need the instructions?
 
JetRanger206 said:
The question and answer is what solved it for me. Robots can't follow specific instructions, simple as that. I see you added the question and answer, do you still need the instructions?
Click to expand...

No - I found how to do it on the vBulletin Forums but thanks again for the offer. Since we put the question in we have had no spammer registrations. So, so far, the news is good :)
 
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