[IMPORTANT] Regarding Recent Spammers

[Agro]

For a small update on our situation and why it's taking so long to figure out a solution, given a bunch of circumstantial evidence we're not really dealing with bots here. It's people getting paid to spam. 

They are not geographically easy to track down with most of them 'coming from' random countries in Europe and North America which leads me to believe they're using VPNs. (None of these can be blacklisted for obvious reasons.)

So this is causing me to have to figure out a way to stop these spam accounts while not putting too much of a burden on new users. So far with verification I've seen people have to wait anywhere from 1 minute to 2 hours to be verified just due to the human factor of an admin having to be online and not busy otherwise. I personally don't like that but it is currently the best solution I've found.

That said, I'm off of work for the week so I'll probably be testing alternative methods as I find them. Next time, I'll be sure to be online the entire time though...