(Cross-posting from my news site, because this is actually somewhat useful info and shouldn't wait for someone to get around and approve the site being advertised here.)

We have all seen them. There are no new posts in a forum then, suddenly, there's a ton of posts with Chinese characters mixed in with English phrases, and they are all spam. Why can the moderators not prevent these from happening? Well, I can't say for certain, as I have not yet had a chance to talk to any of them, but I can venture forth some opinions.

For starters, I will say that I wasn't easy to identify which software package is being used. From my analysis, it is django-machina, a python based forum software package. Django-mahina isn't even a full release yet, as it is only version 0.5.2, at best. As a result, there aren't many tools available to deal with all these bots that proliferate on the forums. Unlike other forum software packages like phpBB, its user base is so small that not many utility programs have been designed for it.

A quick google search, however, does turn up the following anti-spam packages for django-machina. So far, the only anti-spam package that seems to be installed is a simple Captcha, which really didn't seem too difficult to read for a machine. I set up a test account to check and see how difficult it is to post on the forums with a new account that has no details in it, and it was terribly easy. I am not surprised we have a bot problem, because signing up is far too easy to do for a computer, especially one with even remotely accurate OCR technology.

Sooooo... yes. We have a bot problem because the underlying forum software is still, essentially, in beta and doesn't have much user support when it comes to anti-spam packages. Guess we all just need to grin and bear it.

EDIT As of the time of posting, it seems they have added a Captcha to the individual posts now. Might help.

Links
Django-machina https://django-machina.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
D-M Anti-Spam Packages https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/anti-spam/