We have been having another heavy torrent of spam on our forums lately. Months ago we fought it at the expense of my time by adding not only image verification to the subscription and two anti-spam mods, but each and every subscription has to be revised personally by me as well. All that is still in place, which means I receive an average 50 e-mails every day with possible new members. 80% is discarded as "possible" spambots (it's always a pretty wild guess).

This actually proved a more or less successful solution, as spam messages greatly diminished, so I took it gladly. And nowadays it's not nearly as bad as it used to be before all these measures, but it's certainly getting worse. Spambots still register as authentic users, pass anti-spam mods, pass image verification, sometimes get past my own judgment of suspicious names, and even wait a few days before actually start spamming. And then what? BAM! Tramadol and Viagra cheap! ZAP! Britney Spears sex video! At times the spammers are so daring as to even add real porn pictures and videos to their messages. There's no limit to their disrespect.

I'm not getting into the discussion of how much effort they put into fighting anti-spam measures only to be part of an unreadable flood of the same message repeated ad infinitum, or how much they manage to profit from such dubious publicity, but I can tell you something about phpBB: DO NOT use phpBB.

I apologize for ranting here, just thought someone might wanna know this about phpBB.

Now on the bright side, today we have one new member. Looks like a trend: italian abandonware blogs. I receive quite a few applications like this. :) All welcome and pay a visit to Free Abandonware!

I wish I could stay more but I gotta go.