We have been mass-deleting spam bots. Hopefully only them.

[schlumpf]

We have deleted several thousand spam bot accounts. We hope that we did not hit anyone legitimate. People with posts should not be hit. People without posts may be hit if not being active this year. Also, you may be randomly hit by a bad heuristic.

If this is the case, I'm terribly sorry. Please notify us of that.

The point where we had multiple times more users than posts was hit long ago and something had to be done.

[Chase]

I don't remember my sign up, but don't you guys have a captcha?

[schlumpf]

We do, but that doesn't change things.

[Jøk3r]

But thanks schlumpf for you work.

[Milly]

Death to the spam bots!

[Selaya]

Custom captchas (like 'What does .dbc stand for?' [Database Client], 'What`s the community-made modding tool?' [Noggit], et cetera) tend to work pretty well for smaller niche communities.
At the very least, that`s my experience.

<3, Sela

[Steff]

Do not work.  As the spambots are china real people.  We had thks already for some weeks.  Lead to newcommers are nkt able to register.

[Alastor]

Or we can use some sort of Limiting too

- after registration you cant post anything - ( duration - 20 min. )


for example ... something similar is normal at wow server ...
"until you will be lvl 10 you cant join world chat"

[schlumpf]

They register and use accounts with months of not even activating or logging in. Why do you think I was able to delete several thousand accounts with not a single post, but knowing it is a bot? Actual posts are somewhat rare:

[23/Oct/2014:19:22:27] 194477 (instig): jordan
[… 131 other posts by 16 accounts]
[28/Oct/2014:09:51:34] 189736 (xstesternin): http://, www., .com, ugg boots, outlet, store, canada, therapy, shoes, uggs, united states

During that time way more than 16 accounts registered.

This is more of a avoid-registration/delete-bot-accounts issue than a spam issue.

[schlumpf]

Please also note that of those 16 accounts, 4 have been legit users.

[Amaroth]

Thats what I call being trolled.