Recent "spamming incidents" made me think about how we could solve this problem - what do you think about requring all new forum members to enter text shown in captcha? For people who have never heard about captchas, or who have seen them, but don´t recognize this term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

Perhaps also some simple questions like "3 + 5 = ?" could also be useful?

It´s not ideal way, but maybe it will help a bit?

One disadvantage is that it will help only in cases when accounts are created automatically - if accounts are created manually by spammers then this solution won´t help in anything and will only make the registration process bit longer.

Yes. Maybe in words "three plus five".

Or generate a random word and ask the human to enter 1st, 3rd and 5th (example) letters of it.

random word=random

1st, 3rd and 5th letters=rno

maybe if we had some administration staff that would come on more often to see who the new members are they would see that it is being abused. This is the recent list of new members........... do you think there is a problem going?

Thanks Kelowna - user names are very similar to each other. That may mean that they are created automatically... or perhaps spammer just follows some rule or has some tool which generates names of consecutive users.

The problem is that noone can be 100% sure if user is a spammer until that user starts spamming. I think the point is to eliminate spammers as early as possible.

The only way to protect against "human spammers" (not spam-bots) which comes to my mind is moderation of messages sent by new users, until point when moderator decides that particular user is not a spammer. This however would put additional burden on moderators. Also, I think it could discourage new users from using the site, as this would naturally lengthen time required for them to wait for answer to their quiestion on forum.

I agree something should be done to protect this site. I think if for every post you had to enter a captcha code  this would help to solve the problem also I think that if you join and have not ever posted that you should be eliminated if your account is not current in the past 6 months. You can alway sign up again if you chose to use the forums. I also think you should keep your membership somewhat current meaning taking a break from signing in for more than a year would again cause you to lose your username and be deleted from list.

I think that having to enter captcha before sending every post would be too annoying for forum members - especially during heated discussions. Cooling these discussions down using captcha wouldn´t be good thing in my opinion

Another solution that came to my mind was to force new users to enter captcha before their every post until moderator decides that this user is not a spammer, although that, again, wouldn´t help much in case of "human spammers".

it would be annoying but you would also think before you post it would give a chance for a cool off period.