birthday / user list spam

[WWTBAM]

Not at all. The code will be made available in the near future to those I deem not likely to become spammers or similar.

[WWTBAM]

The code is now available for those I chose to give access on a private http://projects.tt-forums.net project.

[WWTBAM]

For anyone who gets banned by the bot and is a genuine user, you will get the following ban message "We believe your account may not be genuine; if this is not the case, please contact us."

[WWTBAM]

I can now report the last 4 days including today have not had any false positives or false negatives. The bot had a few days in a row prior where genuine users were banned (most looked to be inactive) they were caused by trying to tighten up the spam detection too much. The extra checks for a profile field that can't be set on all of the existing checks seem to have fixed the false positives.

You also will not see the bot as being online since it hides it's online status. Owen has said not to bother hiding it's status but I think since it is incapable of interacting with the community it should hide so that a new user is less likely to try and contact it. If people would like to be able to know when it is online doing a job, I can easily make it not hide.

[Voyager One]

Well well done!!!

[WWTBAM]

Today, there was no one to be banned but the bot still checked all the birthdays

[WWTBAM]

Just an update on the bot. As some of you know and will have noticed it still runs daily. I am currently working on making it more accountable by adding extra logging capabilities using phpBB moderator facilities. Once that is done, I would like to give it more power in finding spam accounts (if I get the time).

[Nawdic]

Noticed again that there are a load of spam accounts in the birthday list again - doesn't the robobot work anymore?

[orudge]

Not since the upgrade to phpBB 3.1, no. I've intended to take a look at it and use the general algorithms it used to go through accounts on a database level, but haven't had the chance to do so yet.

[WWTBAM]

The login code at my end got broken by the update to phpBB 3.1. I have seen evidence that phpBB reports it as being logged in but my code doesn't get the security details required to maintain a login session. I should really post on the phpBB forums about it as that is where I got the original login code from.

Edit: I have just requested help on the phpBB forums. Will post an update when I get a reply over there.

[planetmaker]

Any news? The birthday list is full of spammers which advertize one page or another via their profile's www entry.