What is with the prove you are human crap on here now?

[Scud]

This kind of garbage is getting into everything.  What's the deal?

We're being overwhelmed with spam, both through email and bogus registrations, leading to forum spam. It's becoming too much of an issue for the guys who help keep the Blitz running. There's an invisible version, but not sure if our forum software supports it. Raz is looking into it. In the meantime, it's just a checkbox. Shouldn't be that big a deal?

Dave

What's spam? What's the motive for causing it? Can it accidentally be caused, or does it have to be planned?

Google's definition: "...spam" refers to unsolicited, unwanted, and often irrelevant messages sent over the internet."

The reason? Hard to say. Often it's to advertise something questionable, like a drug (Viagra) or an opiate. Sometimes it tries to drive traffic to a link that might be legit, but usually will give you some free malware. Sometimes it's just gibberish text and leaves you wondering why? Maybe to tell the sender the spam landed somewhere? I can't answer that one.

Most spam is generated by a "bot". Just some code that searches the internet looking for sites that have known exploits. When it finds one, it activates and loads its payload. A reCAPTCHA, like the one we're using, helps prevent that, since the bot can't click on the checkbox (usually), but it's not 100%. Bots don't look at the frontend of a site, they only read the code. When the bot finds a site it exploits it and sends a message to a human. That person can be residing anywhere in the world. Brazil, Ukraine, Russia, Iran, China, both Koreas, are some big ones, but it could easily be someone in the US or UK. They will then try to further exploit the situation, often attempting to introduce server malware. When it's a human and not a bot, that's when you're in trouble.

Most spam is associated with email. I'm sure you've experienced that, though most ISPs have anti-spam filters that flag the vast majority. Your email client probably has a "spam" folder. Take a look inside sometime. Just don't click any links.

The Blitz is protected, but we still have the pain-in-the neck responsibility of finding and deleting it, and banning the IPs from whence it came. It can be time consuming.

Hope that answers your question.

Dave