Forums

You should add a CAPTCHA on the forums. Bots keep spamming them. I think this would help.

Hmm, presumably the spams are from registered users. Maybe a stronger CAPTCHA on the Signup page(s)?

Well, people can still create accounts manually and then use that account to spam the forums.

A CAPTCHA isn't really needed on the sign-up page, but rather when creating forum posts.

CAPTCHAs tend to be a bit annoying, though. I think the best solution anyone has come up with (@jgmdavies IIRC) would be for us to automatically mark as spam anything with just a URL for the topic headline. We do manually scan the stuff that gets spam-filtered (there's a lot), so we'd almost certainly pick up any false-positives.

I fear my idea of a 'URL only' filter might not work for long if they monitor their results!

I don't know much about this, except that the people involved are presumably 'paid to post'. Would it help to charge a small sum to join PA, even for a 'free' a/c, e.g. 5 or 10 pounds?

It would definitely help with spam, but we're keen to keep the free-as-in-beer option open -- there are a lot of people who just can't pay for whatever reason, and our free plan doesn't cost us much to keep running.

How about something called "No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA"?

I think we'd like to try getting our spam detection working better (we have some plans in this direction) before we go to captchas. The "No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA" option looks like it might be useful even though it's still a bit intrusive.