Stopping spambots

Lord Aro · **Posted:** Tue Dec 29, 2009 9:36 am

i think i have a way to stop spambots
i know someone who runs a forum and he has stopped pretty much all spambots by having a box when you register that defaults to yes:

Attachment:

botstopper.png [ 21.86 KiB | Viewed 879 times ]

if the answer is left as yes then the member is blocked
fernforum.net

Hyronymus · **Posted:** Tue Dec 29, 2009 10:05 am

It's called captcha and it works if you use the newest version. And I believe phpBB is still using the old one by default.

JamieLei · **Posted:** Tue Dec 29, 2009 10:59 am

Plus there seems to be an increasing number of human-generated spam posts.

AndersI · **Posted:** Tue Dec 29, 2009 11:32 am

Hyronymus wrote:

It's called captcha...

Actually he's talking about the Yes/No box above the captcha ("Are you a spammer: <Yes>"). As long as the spambots haven't adapted to this (must be changed to <No>), they will not be activated.

Illegal_Alien · **Posted:** Tue Dec 29, 2009 12:05 pm

I have seen some of those protections wich are asking to solve a simpel math.

like 2+3=over 90000!!!!!!!

Daan Timmer · **Posted:** Tue Dec 29, 2009 1:06 pm

or, what I've seen on an other forum. You create an account. Then manually have to enter a forum group. And only that group is allowed to post.

Hyronymus · **Posted:** Tue Dec 29, 2009 1:08 pm

The best way to stop spambots is to ask for moderator approval. But that's simply undoable on large forums.

orudge · **Posted:** Tue Dec 29, 2009 3:56 pm

And the problem is, a lot of forum spam these days isn't actually by an automated bot, but, as far as I can tell, by an actual human who is being paid (probably rather badly) to post it.

CommanderZ · **Posted:** Tue Dec 29, 2009 3:58 pm

orudge wrote:

And the problem is, a lot of forum spam these days isn't actually by an automated bot, but, as far as I can tell, by an actual human who is being paid (probably rather badly) to post it.

.. or they use humans to make the forum registration (ur just teach the spambot to register to the forum) and the pass it to the bot...

Railwaymodeler · **Posted:** Wed Dec 30, 2009 8:54 pm

I am thinking some of the spambots are indeed human posted.

There are a lot of shady SEO (Search Engine Optimization) outfits out there, that only post their clients URLs in spam messages, as a means to having more pages link to the client's site, thereby usually improving their Google (or other search engine) ranking.

What would be interesting, is if some company came out with a 'blacklist' of places that spambots register from, and if forum engines could use that blacklist to block spambots. Of course, like antivirus, it would likely have to be updated very often.

Daan Timmer · **Posted:** Thu Dec 31, 2009 10:50 am

just like ad-block plus?

Railwaymodeler · **Posted:** Thu Dec 31, 2009 3:54 pm

I knew that idea sounded awfully familair! :lol:

ThorRune · **Posted:** Thu Dec 31, 2009 7:51 pm

AndersI wrote:

Hyronymus wrote:

It's called captcha...

Actually he's talking about the Yes/No box above the captcha.

Actually, they're both CAPTCAs. (Completely Automated Process to Tell Computers and humans Apart)

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Stopping spambots

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