Beware of Spammers!

[Mario]

We currently face a high number of new user registrations which are SPAMmers and bots.
Unless I catch and delete them early, there first posts are usually about porn, crypto or something in Russian.

Recently, their first posts actually make "sense" and are, more or less, related to imaging topics.
Sometimes they reply to posts several months or years old with phrases like "Thank you for sharing" or "I agree", trying to trick the volunteer community moderators into accepting them.

The first posts of new users are all invisible, except for moderators. This allow us to catch and junk them before normal community members see their spam.
Unfortunately, thanks to AI, we'll see more "relevant" posts from new users in the future and once they get beyond the moderators, they will flood the community with ads for casinos, crypto, porn or political campaigns of sorts.

Thanks to all moderators for your help keeping this community friendly and ad-free.

I have enabled Google's ReCAPTCHA today for new user registrations. The old "answer this question" or "which letters do you see in this image" don't work anymore. The bots now use AI to solve these questions Hopefully the ReCAPTCHA proves to be more efficient and keeps spam bots out of this community.

[sinus]

How the world could be much better and friendly without these stupid spammers. 
But ... 

[Darius1968]

Add to the list, TELEMARKETERS! 

[Tveloso]

Mario, a small type-o in the Registration Agreement (your developer's muscle memory turned "It" into "If"):

    

[Mario]

Thanks, fixed.

[philburton]

How the world could be much better and friendly without these stupid spammers. 
But ...

Agree but as long as there are thieves there will be spammers.  Also psychopaths and sociopaths.  Also unbalanced and poorly educated people who will easily fall prey to spammers.

[mopperle]

I'm a moderator in another big forum and see this kind of ,,intelligent" spambots too. Really hard to fight when get around 200 new accounts each week.

[philburton]

I am a member of a forum related to some Microsoft Office products.  The moderator is also the list owner is also the person who responds to almost all queries.  In practice, I do the work of flagging spam to her.