Ahh, such a pain! We have always had problems with spammers, bots and such registering and posting spam links… and it has only gotten worse as of late. At one point, we would get around 15-20 new accounts each day. I tried my best to keep up with deleting these accounts but with outdated forum software and a serious lack of admin mods, it became too much to deal with. When we hit around 2,500 spam accounts I knew I had to do something.
A few months ago Josh installed a mod to the admin panel which shows a list of registered users, allowing you to sort them using various criteria. This greatly reduced the amount of time it took to delete spam accounts. Before, I would have to search each user in the database and remove them manually. Now, I can just check them one by one in a list.
Last month at the OCIA.net LAN party, Josh and I implemented image verification with high hopes that it would curb some of the spam. It worked to a certain extent, probably cutting down 30% of new registered spam accounts. While there I showed him how I deleted spam accounts… clicking one by one in the list. Then it hit me: I can put my Logitech G15 keyboard to use here! I quickly created a macro that would check each box and move to the next. Now, I just push a single button repeatedly to check everyone in the list. Genius!
There are still some sorting options that are lacking, such as sort by website listed. This would make it easier to spot spam accounts, as the majority usually have some off-the-wall link…
