[nvda] spammers abusing webvisum

damn it. I was afraid this was going to happen.
Every so often, something is invented for the disabled community and then some twit has to walk in and ruine it for everyone. WebVisum is a one-of-a-kind service that allows screen reader users to solve CAPTCHAs. As you all know, CAPTCHAs are designed to stop automated registrations 
by spammers who then attempt to saturate websites with advertisements.
we didn't think it would be long before the spammers heard about webvisum, and we were right. They have been abusing our service by creating a massive number of accounts in order to 
bog down websites with nonstop spam, making our lives that much harder.
Just to give you an idea of the problems we are facing, in the past few weeks we caught 2 persistent spammers trying to do just that. As a first response, we removed these accounts by hand. However, we are aware that deleting accounts is only a short term solution as these guys won't take 
no for an answer! enough is enough!
Have no fear, all is not lost, we planned for this exact situation! Our solution was to start with no barrier to registration, in order to get the WebVisum 
community up and running.
This has worked well. Next, we need members of our community to vouch for people they know, who wish to become new members. Since we now have over several thousand members, there are many people who can help others become new members as well.
Please be kind to your friends with visual impairments and offer them invites, but only if you are sure they are real people. Please be aware that if you give an invite to a spammer, your account may end up being removed along with theirs and potentially others that were created from your invites. So be 
careful when giving out invites!
If you are not a member yet, and you don't know anyone else with a WebVisum account to request an invite from, we advise you to contact us. 

To post messages to the list send email to
nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To modify your NVDA Email settings go to:
http://www.freelists.org/list/nvda
Thank you for your continued support of Nonvisual Desktop Access, an open 
source free screen reader for Microsoft Windows:
http://www.nvda-project.org/
To get the latest NVDA snapshot:
http://www.nvda-project.org/snapshots/
Report bugs or make feature requests at:
http://trac.nvda-project.org/
Message Archive:
http://www.freelists.org/archives/nvda

Other related posts: