Forum is open again reCAPTCHA is in
Update May 26
The forum has been reopened - you no longer need partner access to post.
The access to the forum was restricted for about a week. I did not receive much feedback during that time, but the feedback I did get was mostly negative. That was expected though since the only affected people were those who lost access. I have now decided to reopen the forum and try other approaches to combat spam. Mainly for two reasons:
- The users that benefit the most from the forum are those who are not employed at a partner company. Since they don't have access to the support system the forum is place they go to seek help. Shutting them out from the forum will drive them away from the community, we'd much rather have them stay. This is kind of obvious in retrospect but I apparently needed someone to point that out for me - thank you, Luc and others.
- I was not particularly happy with the lockdown solution either and I felt bad linking this article and replying "this is why you can't post anymore". It felt wrong.
Instead of the access restriction I have added Google's reCAPTCHA to the new thread and reply forms. This is a relatively simple CAPTCHA that most often only requires you to check a box but sometimes you need to select images based on certain critera. As i mentioned in the original message (below) I believe that most of the spam is not posted by bots - we'll see what effect the CAPTCHA has. Either way we now have robust bot protection.
As before, please comment below.
Original message from May 19
Around the same time as this article is published the access rights for the forum will be changed. After the changes have been made only accounts that have been associated with a partner company are allowed to post in the forum. Read access will still be granted to everyone.
The reason for this decision is the large amount of spam that has been posted during the last few months. The traps I've laid to try to catch and discard posts by bots have had no effect, this means that either that bots don't fall for the traps or the spam is not posted by bots. My belief is that the latter is true.
We have discussed other solutions to the problem, mainly two that are still on the table:
- Use CAPTCHA. An annoyance for everyone that definitely will shut out bots but will not stop a determined spammer.
- A wait period and/or a posting limit for new accounts. Annoying for new members but, again, will not stop determined spammers.
Please post any feedback in the comments below, I want to have a solution in place that we're all happy with.
