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Wednesday, April 25, 2007

An easy fix to the PHP software problem

Steve Cole reports: For the months we have used PHP software for the forum on this site, I've had to pay about $100 a month in employee costs to "check user registrations". The problem is that every day, we get dozens of robots trying to sign up for the forum to post Viagra ads and other spam. Vanessa had to set the Forum for manual registration, which takes a lot of time.

When this issue was mentioned on the other BBS (the discus one on the legacy site), Dean from Star Ranger said that he had fixed the problem by including a "question" with the registration, one for which the answer is in the human-accessible FAQ file. Result, the number of bogus robot spam registrations dropped to zero immediately.

So, Dean, I owe you lunch. You're saving me a hundred bucks a month and saving Matt no end of aggravation.