Death Toll Rises, +100 Banned

Some of you might have noticed the steep decline in user count over the last 24 hours. Fear not, this is not because some sort of mass-exodus but rather part of my ongoing effort to fight SPAM. Not just the obnoxious post-spam either but the registration-spam we have been suffering.

One IP created some 50+ accounts, and there were about a dozen others SPAM-ing registration and creating junk profiles filled with links. In an effort to curtail spamming registrations we have enabled several layers of security plugins which for the most part remain unintrisive.

Though they should stay out of your way most of the time some such as the SFS SPAM Database have been known to give false positives. If you run into any issues with either the SFS DB, StopBadBehaviour, or Akismet feel free to contact me via my various profile icons to get yourself whitelisted.

Seems the old CAPCHA wasn't enough and some 1/3rd of registrations were spammers. Beyond the above questions new user registration will also contain some either logic or UTAU based Q&A verification. That should curtail any more robo-registration.

With all the existing spammers purged and registration made harder our user count should be more representative of our actual user-base without all the bots that were previously counted.

Update:
As part of our anti-SPAM measures any post that has too many external links, made by a poster that has too few posts, may be held in moderation if the security plugins deem them suspicious.

Users with +10 posts are automatically whitelisted and won't be affected by these changes.