SRL Archive - News and General

Spam Bots, Spam Bots, Spam Bots, Spam Bots, Spam Bots, Spam Bots and even more Spam Bots!


I'v been banning them loads lately. Is there something that we could do about them? They are extremely annoying :S


~Home

nofollow onto URLs could help but niels told me it's not easy to do on our version of VB.

Not really possible to stop them signing up unless you use those puzzle like captchas.

From: Harry
nofollow onto URLs could help but niels told me it's not easy to do on our version of VB.

I think they come for pagerank+traffic, they would post on nofallow too.

I suggest a simple equation on registering.

If you do something like an equation, make sure it's done *right*. So often I see the equation on signsup written in plaintext.

All of this, however, ignores the obvious: spambots can have the accounts manually made. Though it would be a good way to put off most.

From: Kave
Not really possible to stop them signing up unless you use those puzzle like captchas.

We do use puzzles. Try to register yourself. I'm pretty sure it's done by humans.

From: bevardis
I think they come for pagerank+traffic, they would post on nofallow too.

I suggest a simple equation on registering.

Nofollow makes it so pagerank doesn't take effect…

The guy that does my gaming clan forums has something that he now uses with our forums and we now have almost no spambots anymore. At least I haven't seen any for about a month or so. I'll see what he uses, because it works for us.

Not allowed to posts links if you have no post count

From: Yago
Not allowed to posts links if you have no post count

Then the spam posts would ultimately still be there, just without a link :p

Most likely they'd just post some garbled version of the link. Selling cheap viagra is serious business.

From: Harry
Nofollow makes it so pagerank doesn't take effect…

I know, but there's still traffic for them.

Can you not just set it so when someone registers they go into a group where they have to get their first posts approved ? The only place you allow posting for that group is in the 'Welcome to SRL' Forum and only give read permission for the rest of the forums.

You can do that with phpBB3.

Make it so you can't make threads if you have a post count below 3?

From: Bad Processor
Make it so you can't make threads if you have a post count below 3?

Yeah something like you have to have 10 posts and registered for a week until you can create a thread.

Post limits before URLs and such are just bypassed by spamming their posts up to that number…

How about adding a reCaptcha to the registration page?

From: sf411
how about adding a recaptcha to the registration page?

From: wizzup?
we do use puzzles. Try to register yourself. I'm pretty sure it's done by humans.

123

The puzzle they have now is easy to get around, but with reCaptcha I do not know of any way to get around it.

From: sf411
The puzzle they have now is easy to get around, but with reCaptcha I do not know of any way to get around it.

Good point, but there's http://decaptcher.com/. Get's around recaptcha, not 100 percent of the times tho. maybe 80 p.

That is for Captcha not reCaptcha. Which are two different 'security' checks.

From: sf411
That is for Captcha not reCaptcha. Which are two different 'security' checks.

Captcha is Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart

Recaptcha is a "brand" of captcha.

From: Internet
Yes, it is fully possible to bot recaptcha. They have a SRC per image, and all it takes is to download the image and send to decaptcher.

I'm gonna bump this back up, because today I must have counted 30+ threads made by spam bots… you're not kidding, Home…

We need to find something…. Tho I've been banning quite a few of them.

[noparse][joke] We should have a question like "Explain Time." and give a 50000 character minimum. [/joke][/noparse]