Spam bots getting worse for anyone else?

[Den]

I’m seeing way more junk signups and weird spam posts the last few days, even with basic filters on. It’s not even the usual stuff, just messy garbage all over the place. Anyone found anything that actually helps without breaking legit users?

[Nathan]

Yeah, been seeing the same crap. Feels like the junk got way more random lately too, not just the usual “buy pills” nonsense. On a couple sites I’ve had decent luck with a honeypot + a mild rate limit, but the real difference was turning on email verification before anything gets through. CAPTCHA by itself didn’t do much, honestly, and I’m not keen on the heavier ones because they annoy real users. Also worth checking if it’s coming through a specific form/plugin. I’ve had one stupid contact form plugin basically invite spam for two weeks before I killed it. Just my experience. Honestly,

[meloncrash]

Personally, Honestly, kind of feels like yeah, it’s been uglier lately. I’ve had a couple sites where the spam just turned into random word salad instead of the usual obvious junk. Nathan’s not wrong about the plugin angle, though I hate saying that because half the time it’s always “just change plugins” like that fixes the whole mess. One of mine was getting hammered through a newsletter signup form I barely even looked at for months. I’m still not convinced CAPTCHA is worth the headache unless it’s really bad. The bots seem to cruise right past the…

[meloncrash]

Yeah, it’s been worse on a couple of mine too. The weird part is it doesn’t even look like the old obvious bot junk half the time, just garbage that somehow still gets past the dumb basic filters. I’m honestly getting tired of “just add CAPTCHA” being the answer to everything. Half the time that just annoys real people and the bots still stroll through anyway.

[Pike]

Yeah, same here. The weird part is it’s not even the dumb “cheap meds” stuff anymore, it’s just garbage noise that looks like it was made to slip past basic filters. I’ve had better luck tightening up the signup flow a bit and watching which form is actually getting hit instead of throwing CAPTCHA at everything. Half the time the spam isn’t “site-wide,” it’s one stupid entry point getting farmed. Nathan’s right on the email verification thing, annoying as it is. It’s one of the few things that’s actually cut junk down for me without making the whole site miserable. I mean,

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