Can getdare temperately stop taking new members so they can lock out the spambot from making new accounts until someone can work out a way to permanently stop them . after that start letting new members join again.

Very annoying indeed. I do hope getDare staff will find a way to stop it.

Cleaned for the moment. I work weekend nights so things will be quite delayed on weekends, sorry folks. and all the other mods go party and get drunk.....

Thank you! :)

the bad thing about this is that it would be unfair for the members that wants to join. But this idea might work though.

Is bot using any specific IP adress or adres from specyfic range?

Is Google Captcha free of charge? I done reserch 2 years ago and it was free? There was even free of charge libraries to implement it.

I can't believe people are daft enough to click through the links and buy anything, but I assume enough people must do to make it worth their while setting the bots up!

Unfortunately, because it costs them almost nothing to do, they do not need many positive responses to make it pay off.

That said, I agree that there cannot be very many people who do it, and the return must be low even before the fallout from bad press. If any of the actual companies behind the products could be identified, they might be more willing to cut off the flow to the spammers.

Query:
Are there enough GD moderators for the massive number of members? Is there a need to have more moderators/administrators who can chop down these spam posts and accounts?

The spam accounts must be many more than legit accounts joining every day. It seems that a medium-term answer is to have all new accounts moderated - even just approved by a person - before being able to make posts.

I have been on other boards, in serious topics, where new posters had to make something like 5 other posts before they could start a thread.

It's worth trying anyway

I'm assuming they are working on a long term solution to this problem? Other than just deleting spam and banning accounts, as I think they are fighting a losing battle!

Anyone starting a new thread (especially an AMA one) has little chance of being seen.

That person must have lot of patience to create so many accounts to mess up the AMA lol

Lol no, it's purely algorithmic. They create one script and that script is what's making the accounts.

What I find interesting in sort of a fun way (though I'm sure it's annoying to the mods) is that some of the usernames of these bogus accounts are beginning to resemble legit names. Words like "little" and "dark" and "boy" have begun to make it to some of the strings of letters and I had to look twice to realize they're not legit accounts. Ain't technology grand?

The bots are learning? Becoming self-aware? ;)

I've noticed that the usernames come in at least three flavours: two types that end in four numbers, and at least one type comprising only random(-ish?) letters.

The thread titles also come in flavours: the ones using "medical" terminology and the one which is just random words. The latter ones are sometimes fun.

Yes, I have been bored lately... :o

im not a computer expert but cant you just close the AMA section for a few days until this can be fixed? no one is going to see AMA anyway now and its blocking other new posts to be seen as well