Hi all — as you may know, we’ve been attacked by spammers a few times recently. As with email spam, it’s a constant arms race with these guys; we upgrade our defenses, and they come up with new ways to circumvent them.

We’ve got all the standard defenses; email validation, IP banning, CSRF, and so on. We also tried CAPTCHA, with little success. It turns out that basically, spammers are simply hiring real people to show up and manually create spam accounts.

In light of this, we’re going to switch to an invitation system. From now on, new members will have to have an invitation code provided to them by an existing member.

http://www.lightstalkers.org/invitations

I hope this will be a real solution, which doesn’t inconvenience our actual audience too much. If you have any issues with it, just email us at support@lightstalkers.org.