Site updates to help prevent the spambots

[admin]

I've noticed a few bots getting around the site's spam protection in the last few weeks, so I did some unplanned maintenance today (apologies for the downtime of about 45 mins) to hopefully prevent it. It's always a revolving door with preventing spam, but I think the site does a fairly good job of it.

[AZ_Five56]

Many thanks! I'm still trying to figure out what the motivation would be for them.

[Harrier]

The only thin I can figure is that they are trying to establish a valid account that will then go dormant (like a mole) and be used at a later time if membership is frozen for some reason. It seems a few boards have gone that direction...
otherwise, enquiring minds would like to know too...

[What]

It's always an ongoing work with these bot. Just report with ! Button and mods/admin will get notification and get on that.

Keep up the great work fellas.

[admin]

There seems to be a group of bots that registered in late October and are just now posting, so while no new ones should be able to register (until they find a and exploit the next security hole), we may still see some bots post using the accounts they previously registered.

[AZG23]

Appreciate it..

[xerts1911]

We salute our admins

[admin]

Just upgraded to reCaptcha v3 from v2 today - hopefully this helps as well.

[High Standard]

I still stay in touch with my Hawaii peeps over on their forum. They are getting the exact same posts from people cutting and pasting the same posts on both forums. It turns out that one of these spammers preyed on one of the users that had advertised he was looking for a particular shotgun. The spammer convinced the user he was legit and the user fell for it and sent the spammer some money. So while some of the posts here could be from bots, some are real live scammers.

BTW, the user that got taken is a very immature Millennial so hopefully he learned a life lesson.