New anti spam solution.

[namida]

As reCaptcha and security questions are no longer effective, and a secret password is frustrating for new users, I've now added CleanTalk anti-spam to the forums. We'll see how well this works, but it should be completely unobtrusive.

If any legitimate would-be users are having trouble registering (or posting), please reach out on the Lemmings Forums Discord or the #lix IRC channel on QuakeNet.

[GigaLem]

That would explain my sudden log out then.

[namida]

That would explain my sudden log out then.

That one would've been due to a slight screw-up while installing it. If anyone saw the "site is down to upgrade to 2.1.6" message during it, this was also the result of the aforementioned screwup.

[namida]

So far, I haven't received any reports of registrations / posts being outright blocked when they shouldn't be. If anyone does encounter this, please let me know. I'm also reviewing the logs periodically to look for anything that was filtered but shouldn't have been, and haven't seen any.

We did have one case where a legitimate post got flagged for moderator review. This post was definitely not spam, and came from a long-time member of the forum. Nonetheless, I can see why an overly-cautious filter may have flagged this post. There's only been a handful of posts since the filter was installed, so it's hard to get a general idea of the trend of how often it will flag things - if it's frequently flagging legitimate posts I might need to rethink things (though perhaps the first thing to try here is seeing whether I can modify the plugin so that it only flags posts from newer users), if this seems to be a one-off or at least an uncommon occurance then I don't think it's a huge problem if a moderator has to approve a post every once in a while.

[namida]

Despite asking several times, no one has had anything to say about the new setup (outside of the one-off aforementioned case with the post being flagged for mod review). I'm going to go with the "no news is good news" assumption here, but if this is wrong - please actually reach out to me if it's causing problems. Don't assume that someone else will be having the same issue and report it for you - this community is far too small for that assumption to be reliable. And just in case anyone got the wrong idea, we are definitely not going to warn you or ban you or tell you off for reporting a technical issue. If for any reason you don't feel comfortable discussing it with me, you're welcome to raise it with a different staff member instead and they can pass it on (anonymously if you wish, although anonymity may limit how easily I can investigate).

I can also say that:
- Either no spambots have slipped through, or mods have been very quick at cleaning them up. (I also assume that if such had happened, it would've gotten back to me.)
- Aside from the one case mentioned above, no genuine posts have been incorrectly flagged for review or outright blocked.
- I have noticed a sharp decline in the number of guests viewing the site since setting up CleanTalk. This is expected - where it suspects a particularly high risk of spam, it blocks the site altogether rather than just preventing posting / registering. (This should also help with the database crash issue - I still haven't figured out exactly what leads to it and we're still relying on the "temporary" fix of having a background script that checks and restarts it periodically if needed, but it appears to be the database getting "overloaded", which is far less likely if we're not getting slammed with page loads from spambots.)