Month: January 2013

  • Fighting splogs, and some proposed tweaks to the registration process

    Hey guys -

    We’ve been getting hit pretty hard by spam blogs lately, aka splogs. A lot of the times the sploggers will just create a site and then… do nothing. Most of the account don’t try to spam anyone; instead, they just sit there with a link in their profile. We have shut down a lot of these so-called “splogs”, but they just keep coming.  The worst part of splogs is that they are created in such a way that they are slowing down our themes database. As a result, some of our REAL users are having trouble creating accounts or editing their theme  

    To help address this, we’re looking into ways that we can prove that our new users are actually real people. We already have a CAPTCHA in place, but apparently there are now companies in China and India that do nothing but hire humans to defeat CAPTCHA tests.  We’ve tried a number of technical fixes, but a lot of times the technical fixes prevent real users from being able to register accounts. :(

    So we’ve had to switch gears a bit.  After some brainstorming, we’ve come up with a few new ways we can try and prevent these humans-for-hire from creating fake accounts:  Continue reading