15 replies to this topic

[duke_Qa]

I dunno what the deal is about, but there's been a few cases of "new members" putting their nose into the think tank, and most of these new members have like links to ginseng and whatnot in their sigs, and speak mediocre english(worse than mine at least ).


What is the current system on new members? is it a sort of grouping where every new user gets put until some admin figures out where he should be?

In that case, wouldn't it be possible to restrict their 'reply' and 'new topic' rights to one subforum?

[Nighthawk]

Those "new members" that you're seeing are actually bots that seem to have got past our defenses. New Members is the member group that anyone who registers is automatically assigned to, and then they are automatically promoted to Posting Member after their post count reaches 10.

While restricting New Members to one single forum would solve the bot issue, it would somewhat hamper any legitimate new members who join the network... in fact, Guests would have more rights than them.

[duke_Qa]

So the problem has been noticed and attended to, or will it keep on going? Same for me really, but it's been increasing a bit in the think tank, so I figured I'd check what options there are.

[Nighthawk]

Unfortunately, I don't think there's anything immediate we can do short of completely reworking the board's Captcha system. The best thing I think we can do is just if people report posts that seem to be from one of these bots, then one of us will ban them, at least until we can come up with a more permanent solution.

Of course, I may be wrong on the Captcha thing, that area's not my department.

But yeah, the problem has been noticed, we've just been banning the bots as they crop up.

[Pasidon]

seem to have got past our defenses.

E-mail verification?

[Clive]

You can't do anything actually. These bots auto-registers, can mass create emails, can validate emails upon registration, can bypass known captcha. They do this for Search Engine Optimization purposes. The software is called Xrummer and it can also use different IP addresses to spam your board.

[Solinx]

Unfortunately Clive is pretty much right.

Basically the only really effective thing to do is to think of an unique and effective validation method that doesn't annoy new members in the registration process and keep that method a secret. Althogether not an easy task. And then, if a board is popular enough, or if someone just wants to be annoying, bots are customised to bypass the unique solution, which is often easier than putting the custom solution in place.

So yeah, any new automated solutions is only temporary, just like with game copy protection and DRM.
At some point the protection will be bypassed and it will again come down to the moderators to manually remove spam.

[Allathar]

How about a simple question, which you're required to answer for registration? Something like 'what is the colour of the field below?'

[Masterbadeend]

What also seems to work, because some bots can read images atm, turn the question around so it's turend 180 degrees. (Allathar, what's "Op de kop" in English?)

[Allathar]

On it's head? No idea, actually.

[KamuiK]

A friend's friend of me has worked out a solution whihc seems to work. During the registering process, there is an extra tab completely hidden in the css from any human, but the bots would obviously see it. If the bot now fills it out, for example with the eMail adress, it should indicate it's a bot in the first place because humans would normally not even see it.

[Jacky]

It doesn't happen to someone from FS, does it?

[Caspa]

Maybe it's time you stopped dicking around then. Instead of simply banning individual accounts or ip addresses, find out where the bulk are coming from and ban the entire country. That may sound crude, but it'll work.

It's not like this place will be any worse off without the Chinese and Russians anyway.

Edited by Caspa, 08 August 2010 - 02:03 PM.

[Phil]

Certainly not going to happen.
Also, have you ever heard of Contra? One of Revora's most successful mods? A good deal of the mod team and fans are from Russia.

[Caspa]

Am I right about the origins of the bulk of the spambots?

[Romanul]

If Revora admins are spambots, yes.