Hey guys,
So spam and spambots has been one of those ongoing bugbears. A year or two ago we got slammed really hard with just torrential spam, and so we added cloudflare. That has a lot of advantages, such as also improving site loading times, DDOS protection, and other stuff. However, for some users that are legitimate but unlucky, it would "challenge" them with a captcha or something on that order every time they tried to do a new post.
Now we're getting more spam again, and have been over the last few months. A few things:
1. I realized that our forums were a bit out of date on their versions for security fixes. That's been updated.
2. I have added a new service called Cleantalk, which is specifically designed at blocking spambots and which will hopefully impact regular users less.
3. To see about that, I've basically lowered the cloudflare anti-spam protection levels to being near-off. If that proves problematic, I'll turn it back up, but hopefully between cleantalk and/or this we can weed out the bulk of the spam that we're currently seeing.
Anyway, if anyone runs into anything strange or has comments on how the new thing affects them (hopefully it will not), then please let me know!
EDIT: Oh, and also, the Captcha for the forums itself, as well as the questions that a new user has to answer, are all turned off now. Between Cloudflare and Cleantalk those should be overkill for sure, and I know people hated them. Cleantalk claims that they are not needed if you use their service, so we'll see.
