[Mailman-Users] bots subscribing to lists via web forms to avoidmember-only restrictions

[steve]

>Are there plans to enhance the web subscription form with a type of
>captcha, or other technique to discourage bots?

>Anyone else hit by this practice much?
Human assisted registration is becoming more popular - apparently there is even setups where they auto farm-out the capcha recognition to pools of people who simply enter the stuff and the system processes everything else automatically.

On forums, even with capcha, there is an element that persists.  The best solutions have been to ban the most frequent abused mail systems, and potentially block problem IP ranges (like Asia).  How much you can do that depends on your list's scope.

In short - yes there appear to be human assisted automated spam generation systems in play.  Systems with a confirm email have also been mass defeated with software, but most hacks don't bother to build their own and try to use pre-made spamming software.  Unless mailman has been targeted by these developers in the past, its unlikely someone is using pure software to automate it.

       
---------------------------------
Looking for last minute shopping deals?  Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.