Posting links has been disabled

[Bound2Burst]

This is a further measure to stop spam robots which are still getting through. Spam problems originate from two main sources: The first and overwhelmingly worst is robots that post messages containing amazing amounts of links without signing up for a user account. They simply hit boards, hoping that they allow guests to post. I don't, but this doesn't prevent them trying to register. They somehow bypass the catchpa to do this - their creators are more sophisticated than I am at this stuff. You can still post text links to pages elsewhere of course; they simply won't be clickable. Users will need to copy and paste to use them.

What I am hoping to stop is the automatic registration process. phpBB allows users to include a link to their site in their profile. This causes spammers to register accounts on thousands and thousands of boards, boosting the PageRank of their sites. More on this later.

[Loo-Loo]

It never ceases to amaze me with all this website stuff.

The amount of time some people must spend just analysing the code for web forums and message boards, just so they can find a way to get around the protocols and spam everything.

I have no idea how to bypass a captcha, because half the time I cant read the letters or numbers on many of them but if I make the slightest mistake they reject my entry.

I suppose that is the problem with using the most popular message board technology, it is the one that has been analyses the most and is the one the spammers want to crack.

Oh well, I wish you luck in your efforts to thwart all of these problems, Dave.

PS, we can always post a link by adding a few spaces where the dots should go i.e. www bound2burst net . This way the software (hopefully) doesn't see the string as a link and is it really too much trouble to add the dots back in and not be able to click on it from within the message?