Metanet Forums

I'm trying out a couple new things in regards to our New User Registration. Those of you who check the forum normally (Daily, more than once per day), if you'd be so kind as to monitor things over the weekend and see if the bot population seems to slow or cease, that would be wonderful.

Admins and Mods - Any time you ban or suspend a bot, keep a quick note of who and when and how many. I'ma see if I can get this under control. As of this posting, PowerCordsz is our newest member. I'll be keeping tabs on the new member registration over the next few days. I don't want it to come down to Admin approval (Because that was a pain back at Forumer), but we'll see.

Thanks all!

06/11/2011 14:27 PDT: Bartenginee [email protected] 95.27.133.93 (Cialis spam)

I enabled Admin Approval one night, and had three emails within the next half hour from bots that had registered. I then turned it off, assuming that you guys would have gotten those emails as well, and that that would have been incredibly annoying for you. Can you confirm that that was so?

I was wondering what that was. That explains a lot, actually.

Also, 6 AM 6/11/11 - disabled/deleted/IP Banned SvetaBeloglaz, a Russianbot, but thought his signature was cute enough to save -

Heh, we both tried to ban him at once. Seems as though bot registration has not slowed. Admin Approval is perhaps the only option left, but that's really annoying since we all receive an email. Again, I'd like to put the word out for Slappy to update the phpBB software, the more recent versions of which include reCaptcha options.

Our forum has a captcha code, right? How are they getting past that?

I can only assume that when a Captcha is generated, the information for what characters are in a given image is stored somewhere that the bot can read, and that's not something we can have any control over, I don't think.

Beyond that, I still have one more trick to try, which I'm not sure will work, but we'll see.

Hmmm. In that case, all I can contribute to the idea pool is A) Have something that will ban new users that fit a certain criteria (ie, 40 years old and from Russia), and B) http://xkcd.com/810/

You could always implement something that bots aren't programmed to deal with, such as having 6 numbers displayed under a box (they wouldn't even have to be randomly generated), and having users enter those numbers into the box. If the numbers in the box don't match what you made, then just put some javascript on the 'ok' button making sure that the user won't register.

Wait, wait. Has anyone deleted a bot or seen a bot or banned any bots since Friday?

N4Srs wrote:Wait, wait. Has anyone deleted a bot or seen a bot or banned any bots since Friday?

This guy? His profile seems ... suspicious ... what with his heavy interests in marketing :P

I don't remember if I've seen any bots this weekend, though.

mediate wrote:

N4Srs wrote:Wait, wait. Has anyone deleted a bot or seen a bot or banned any bots since Friday?

This guy? His profile seems ... suspicious ... what with his heavy interests in marketing :P

I refuse to initially distrust anyone who lists both glowsticking and kitchen chemistry as interests.

N4Srs wrote:Wait, wait. Has anyone deleted a bot or seen a bot or banned any bots since Friday?

Nope. Does that mean that whatever you did is proving effective?

Not since the one we crossed streams on, Blizz-o.

I don't think it's been solved, but for reference, what I did is require symbols in passwords when new users register. My suspicion was that the random password generation of most (If not all) bots would not include symbols and automatically block most registrations.

I've seen one tonight, but I still haven't seen any successful registrations of bots since Friday. Perhaps this solved things until current Administration can work on the phpBB update thing.

Got rid of a tuvw121, who registered on Friday.

Huh. I wonder how many bots register and then *immediately* post their spam? Just thought of that.

N4Srs wrote:My suspicion was that the random password generation of most (If not all) bots would not include symbols and automatically block most registrations.

Wow. That's really dumb of them. I guess they don't care about their security, but you'd think, since a human would never have to look at it (and the account would probably only be accessed once anyway) that the password could be a truly random assortment of characters. But maybe enough forums don't allow punctuation in their passwords or something.

N4Srs wrote:Huh. I wonder how many bots register and then *immediately* post their spam? Just thought of that.

This is exactly what I suspect whenever I see an innocuous post by what is clearly a bot: sure, it isn't spam now, but they could just as easily edit the post with a link dump later on, such as when the topic moves off the front page. Edits don't bump topics, after all.

T̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư wrote:

N4Srs wrote:Huh. I wonder how many bots register and then *immediately* post their spam? Just thought of that.

This is exactly what I suspect whenever I see an innocuous post by what is clearly a bot: sure, it isn't spam now, but they could just as easily edit the post with a link dump later on, such as when the topic moves off the front page. Edits don't bump topics, after all.

But by then what's the point? Nobody's going to see it except bot-hunters like yourselves.

Aidiera wrote:But by then what's the point? Nobody's going to see it except bot-hunters like yourselves.

Search engines' bots will see them, which can (theoretically) bump up those links in search results ("black" SEO). That's the point in 99% cases nowadays; nobody expects humans to click those links directly.

Aidiera wrote:But by then what's the point? Nobody's going to see it except bot-hunters like yourselves.

One of the factors in Google's PageRank algorithm is the number of links a website has pointing to it from other sites; websites with lots of links pointing at them will likely show up earlier in Google search results.

Wait is this real, I mean do really bots register here? I mean i cant see the benefit for them, they cant destroy anything here or what? Grape Rape Ape Pe E!

To advertise. Some people just don't realize that it never works.

ENT474 wrote:To advertise. Some people just don't realize that it never works.

T̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư wrote:

Aidiera wrote:But by then what's the point? Nobody's going to see it except bot-hunters like yourselves.

One of the factors in Google's PageRank algorithm is the number of links a website has pointing to it from other sites; websites with lots of links pointing at them will likely show up earlier in Google search results.