Yes, I am sorry for that, we are looking for solutions, Geo-blocking feels wrong in principle and practically we do have a minority of user who are from these countries and do not deserve the penalties just because they come from these areas, plus the bots can probably use IP change tools.
I for one am blaming no one, i understand the situation, CB has never been full of IT knowledge and i'm well familiar with the challenges of this. It's just frustrating because i know that i could end this if i had the time and access as i've been in that exact position ages ago, and likely @Mob of Blondes too. I just wish they had a proper sysadmin consultant at hand to deal with this and leave something permanently running to filter this out for good...
I do not want to see a geo-block either. I still think that one quick way would be to block any thread title that has a resolvable URL or Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters in it. Though I haven't done any computer programming, so I may be talking out my ass on those two criteria. I still want to allow Chinese/Japanese/Korean text in the thread body itself.
Yay, some days without obvious spam... let's see why... oh, one of those "please teach (for free) my robot cars". Which lead us to... It seems we got a geoblocker for new accounts. Google doesn't work in China, and reCaptcha is provided by... wait for it... Google. They will just write "lucky" or "fortune" as title, just as some examples I captured days ago.
hrm. That's unfortunate, may need to do something else then. Still better than a geoblocker, even if an unintentional one.
We're not doing ge-blocking, just manual approvation of new users until we find a great solution to avoid spambots :)
Yes, geoblocking is a bad idea for a public forum, but so is manually handling this. There needs to be an automatic way to handle this, there's been several workable ones suggested in the thread already, but they either require coding on the forum software, or creating plugins for it (or adding them to your install if they exist already, i know little to nothing about the Xenforo "ecosystem"). If you don't have an in-house developer willing to dig in, you'll have to get the company that makes the forum software to do something about it and do one of those ideas.
Don't worry, we have in-house developers looking into it. Unfortunately, we need days with 39 hours...xD
I know that feeling! (At least it's better than one boss I had, who insisted that there were 48 hours in the day... *shudder* )
Oh yes, those bosses, "Give your 120%!!!" and all that garbage, i won't for the crappy pay you give us, thankfully i'm in a better spot now
This is what the register page does currently: That is reCAPTCHA by Google. Google services don't work in China at all. Thus geoblocking. Or "geoblocking" if it makes you happier. The result is that a country can't pass.
Let's be honest: Most Chinese posters here are probably on a VPN or some sort of proxy, so it's not a big deal to use a Google service. If you really wanted to make it accessible to all no matter what, include an email for people unable to use the Google service to appeal to manually.