Recently the GU forums moved over to the new server. With the move the forums were updated to the most recent version of vBulletin. One of the by-products was that the forum admin section got access to institute a "question/answer" validation on registration. The question is simple "What is Ted's last name?" there's even a note after the question that the answer can be found in the GU About section.

So what exactly is my point in bringing this up, you may be asking yourself.

Well, GU has been plagued for a LONG time by human spammers creating accounts to post their garbage to the forums. Our primary line of defense was setting new user posts to require moderator approval before the post could be seen. Where this works on the surface, you guys didn't have to see it. The moderators and I had to go in, read, and manually delete each the offending messages.

Since the "question/answer" validation was added, the spam has all but stopped. See, it's one thing for human spammers to quickly run through registration, providing false information, in order to attempt to post. It's quite another apparently for them to take the time to go hunt down the answer.

Take that rat bastard spammers!

Woot! I just wish I could do something about the snail-mail spam (yeah, I refer to junkmail as spam now, I have succumbed to geekdom)

One of us! One of us! One of us!!

Oh, sorry.

I'm glad that worked though. Down with spammers I say.

I get spammers trying to sign up on my website all the time and I get very little traffic. I had to institute the email verification process. It cut down on a lot of it.

Breandan, use www.optoutprescreen.com to reduce snail mail spam. It stops the 4 credit agencies from selling your information. It cut my spam down considerably.