Well I've spent many hours over the last few days switching our website chat pages over from my home grown system to a more advanced "off the shelf" forum software, mainly to try and beat the spammers.
2 days in and we get our first post advertising porn sites. I'm afraid I have to give up at this point - apparently the latest thing is that people are paid to hack into web chat pages to post this rubbish. This means that as long as you have a registration system that is human readable, you can't defeat the spammers.
Most of the spam we get is American - its a shame that the U.S. authorities seem to turn a blind eye to it and can't be a***d to try and solve the problem.
I have now switched the registration to "admin approved", which means anyone wanting to join up fills in the registration form and will have to wait for me to approve their account before they can post messages.
Sorry about that - but we can't let our website be constantly defaced.
I have activated all the accounts of people who have signed up so far, and will try to process new accounts as soon as possible.
Jonathan
