Today, I decided to shut down new user registrations for a few hours. Don’t worry, they are enabled again, just not for everybody. E-mail adresses from outlook.com and yahoo.com are now banned. If you want to register with such an address and you are human, please drop us an e-mail. The info page has our address. Alternatively, use an alias or a different e-mail address altogether.
So, why did we ban those domains? Because of spam bots.
I was really surprised how smart they have become: They were able to overcome the (admittedly not too hard) question & answer prompt, they waited some time before posting and between posting again, had (relatively) realistic user names and e-mail addresses… their behaviour isn’t easy to catch. There was only one thing that stood out, and that were their e-mail adresses which were all from the aforementioned domains. We then checked our existing users, nobody had an address from there. So instead of annoying all new users with complex captchas, we decided to simply ban those domains. At least, until we get enough registration requests or the bots start using others, too.
In any case, I hope the spam is gone for now.
- Nachtschatten
