Hello Everyone,

We have noticed an uptick in spam teams being created by users with 0 credits crunched. These teams are often advertising sketchy services and are not created in the spirit of working together to help crunch workunits or build a community. In an effort to combat this, we recently implemented a newer version of reCaptcha during account creation to reduce abuse of the team system by spammers and bots.

This new reCaptcha seems to have helped, but not enough. Effective immediately, we are requiring any new team owners crunch 1 credit to before creating team. In reality, this will not be an issue for anyone signing up for the project to actually contribute to the community. It will however make it vastly more difficult for bot accounts to create teams.

If you have any suggestions for helping us reduce abuse of our website and the team system, please let me know below and we can discuss.

Thank you all for your continued support.

Jake

Hello Everyone,

We have noticed an uptick in spam teams being created by users with 0 credits crunched. These teams are often advertising sketchy services and are not created in the spirit of working together to help crunch workunits or build a community. In an effort to combat this, we recently implemented a newer version of reCaptcha during account creation to reduce abuse of the team system by spammers and bots.

This new reCaptcha seems to have helped, but not enough. Effective immediately, we are requiring any new team owners crunch 1 credit to before creating team. In reality, this will not be an issue for anyone signing up for the project to actually contribute to the community. It will however make it vastly more difficult for bot accounts to create teams.

If you have any suggestions for helping us reduce abuse of our website and the team system, please let me know below and we can discuss.

Thank you all for your continued support.

Jake

How about all new teams be approved by an Admin before they go live? You could then set it up so it auto checks a list of existing teams elsewhere, maybe BoincStats for example could help with a list that gets updated periodically. Any not on the list have to be manually approved by an Admin.

You might consider reporting the more aggregious spammers to the FBI via spam@uce.gov
Also, ISPs subscribe to special services they use to block incoming URLs on their black list. If you get the URLs on their black list, they do not even get through the ISPs to your site.

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Read information on project honeypot, checkout blacklists and also whitelists, maybe look at spamhaus (eg, this project isn't for commercial purposes is it?). Have a robots.txt file and see what's used or abused. If you log webhits, some info is useful, for example check the 404 hits. Run a spell check, some have a blacklist. Automate whatever you can, because the quicker it's taken down, the better for everyone.
As part of *.edu, you may already have resources available upstream in the IT department(s) for rpi.edu, would be worth asking.

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http://www.joescat.com/boinc/