In nearly 3 years since it was set up, this website hasn't suffered from serious spam attacks until the last couple of months - the simple security of requiring a valid email address for registration seemed to be sufficient. However spammers recently started registering and posting comments about existing articles in which they included advertising links. It may seem surprising at first sight that anyone would desperately want their sales of dubious products to be advertised on a church website, but most likely they are just trying to generate links to be picked up by Google and other search-engines, hence improving the ranking of their site in search results.
Apologies if you've noticed these strange-looking comments attached to articles and events. They should now have all been deleted, along with the accounts used to submit them. Also security has been increased by:
- Requiring a 'Captcha' code to be entered during registration. This is an image box containing wavy characters that have to be typed in, designed to defeat automatic spam robots
- Requiring administrator approval of all new registrations, as well as a valid email. Recent spam attacks have mostly used randomly generated usernames, which will in future be rejected - if you are genuine please use a real name !
Hopefully these measures will be sufficient to keep the site open for genuine users to post. If you find your account has been incorrectly blocked please contact the webmaster (the contact form is also now protected by Captcha code).
