Pat -
Please remember that I am just a moderator, not an administrator. As I told someone the other day, my job is to follow the parade and clean up after the elephant - I never get to march in front and wear the fancy hat. From my end of the parade, I don't really know what goes on up there.
That being said, I am under the impression that we are not seeing machine bots. These are probably humans, though I have no clue why they are doing this - just for the thrill, I guess. I understand that some of them keep score, and are in competition with other like-minded idiots.
About a year ago, we went through a terrible interval where the machine bots were suddenly killing us. And it was real spam - someone was trying to sell something in every post. Chris installed a new front end to defeat machine bots, and the spam dropped to zero overnight. I don't know the details, but things were quiet until this latest invasion.
The advantage of "send us a valid email" is that once identified, the ISP can be black-listed, and nothing more from that ISP will get through. ISPs don't like this, of course, so it encourages them to crack down on the abusers.
Bobby -- thanks for the link. I'll peruse it tomorrow. Obviously I need to get a lot smarter about this issue. In the meantime, I'll just keep that shovel handy.
EDIT: OK, I just took a look at the Registration page (I know, I should have done it a long time ago), and it appears that there is a Captcha image-verification test. This is apparently what Chris installed a year ago, and I'm not sure how a bot would get past it. There is also a send-me-an-email-address block, but no indication that the address will be checked for validity and stored as a banned-ISP control measure. We'll see what the next step is.
Bill
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