Weird happenings on Roguebasin?

[PaulBlay]

So, it might just be me but it seems very odd that there are dozens of new user accounts being opened on Roguebasin every day that don't actually do anything. Generally you only need to open an account if you want to edit a page or ask a question in a talk page or something, but all these accounts are doing nothing but spamming up the recent changes special page.

Is it always like that in wikis for some reason, or is it suspect?

[Slash]

It's probably just spambots. Which sucks pretty bad, I'd love to only have legit accounts so we could have a better measure of the size of our community there.

[blargdag]

It's probably just spambots. Which sucks pretty bad, I'd love to only have legit accounts so we could have a better measure of the size of our community there.

Is there no way to block these spambots somehow? Even if just some subset of them? I was browsing Recent Changes on roguebasin, and the real changes are just buried under a mountain of new accounts that look like spambot accounts with randomized names with a fixed pattern.

OTOH this is pretty much the fate of every internet forum that doesn't have the manpower to police everything all the time. So no surprise there.

[Muscles]

We can't tell that they're spambots until they attempt to make a post. We have an effective automated system which traps dozens of attempts to post spam each day, and we could block the accounts at that point but disallowing the post seems sufficient.

[Vosvek]

Shouldn't a custom captcha do the job? Unless there's a way to bypass the captcha altogether?

[blargdag]

We can't tell that they're spambots until they attempt to make a post. We have an effective automated system which traps dozens of attempts to post spam each day, and we could block the accounts at that point but disallowing the post seems sufficient.

Ahh, makes sense. I suppose I could always just turn off user-related messages in Recent Changes myself, so no biggie.

Shouldn't a custom captcha do the job? Unless there's a way to bypass the captcha altogether?

You mean captcha for creating new accounts?  Currently there's already a custom captcha for posting external links (select a non-roguelike from a list), but I'm not sure that's necessarily a good idea since even I had to think twice to answer some of those questions.