Adapt Learning Community: Forum Spam

Hi folks,

As anyone subscribed to the forums can't have failed to have spotted, we were hit by a large quantity of spam yesterday evening and this morning. The amount of spam added to the forums has been increasing gradually over the last few months and we have been taking steps to keep it under control; enabling reCAPTCHA for new user registrations, blacklisting all temporary and disposable email domains and blocking the IP addresses of known spammers.

There's always a difficult balance to strike between stopping spam and ensuring there are minimal barriers to participation on a forum, and in the Adapt Community we've always aimed to keep our forums as open as possible. Equally we don't want our forums to be rendered unusable by spam. To get things back under control we're now actively blocking newly registered users from creating new discussions or replying to an existing thread. They will be prompted when the first register to email adapt.learning@kineo.com to request edit rights.

This will be a temporary measure while we put better spam protection in place (or migrate to an alternative platform to our forums); I hope to open the forums to immediate registration again soon.