I see we seem to be getting hit with a lot of spam recently, we also seem to have plenty of members who have joined but never introduced themselves or posted anything.
It’s been a while since I joined and can’t remember if we had to confirm that we’re not a robot sending out spam, I know this could be a headache to install and that Gordon has his own life away from here, if it involved a small cost I’d certainly donate just to stop these annoying posts..

Gordon installed a Captcha a while ago to stop the automated spam but it seems that the latest ones aren't sent by bots but actual people. Whenever I delete one I send Gordon a PM with the username, title and time so he can dig into the details and see if he can identify the source and prevent any future occurrences. As you say, we've got a lot of registered users that have never posted anything but some are legit but simply lurkers while others haven't been able to log back in since the Captcha was installed.

The stats are pretty low really - Google won't plot graphs of reCaptcha passes and fails because they're too low - but they seem to come in multiples of five.

There are a surprising number of bots that reach but don't even make it past the signup page, because of a clever trick which I won't disclose but which will be obvious to the trained eye ;-)

Further to that, when I get an evening to work on the damn thing I plan on integrating the signup form with https://stopforumspam.com/ which while I wouldn't use it to actually deny someone an account without human intervention might be pretty good for "quarantining" suspect accounts.

One thing to watch is that a lot of folk have signed up but never completed their registration, possibly because they use a Hotmail or Live.com account which filters spam pretty aggressively and doesn't like the confirmation email. If I see someone who looks "real" I'll check their username and email on stopforumspam and then fire them an email from my personal gmail account, which usually has better luck with spam filters.

If anyone felt a bit underemployed and fancied demonstrating their Python skills, I can point you at the github repository :-D

I gave the database a bit of a scrub, so let me know if anything weird is happening.