No more spam, please.

ChiraBeats · 2017-02-18 10:52:14

As you might have noticed, the spambots found us pretty quickly.

Fortunately I gave them the ol switcheroo and they won't be bothering us anymore. Hopefully. These bots are usually hardcoded for vanilla FluxBB installs. While we've gone pretty far from vanilla, the important parts for them are basically still untouched. I went and changed things up a bit. Made a new username field, and hid the old one. Since it's hidden, anything entering text into the old one should be a bot that hasn't got the memo that the box they're typing in is invisible.

Deleted user #61 · 2017-02-18 12:48:18

You should go through the User List and delete the names that appear to be spambots, like the names that have ads in their profile. If a true heartbeat member is deleted in the process, they will return.

As an edit, you could also make registration "pending approval" by you.

Last edited by HBrhody (2017-02-18 12:51:51)

ChiraBeats · 2017-02-18 17:10:15

Can't say I'm super comfortable with deleting registrations. Seems like there are a lot of lurkers. Even if 90% of them are spambots, it'd be a pain for the 10% to recreate their accounts. But this mess does need to be cleaned up. How about we put up a message to all users with 0 posts that they need to post in the next week or else their account will be deleted?

The registration approval is something that I intend to add, it's actually already set up and everything. I just didn't want to put it into effect until registrations slowed down.

paperpenguin · 2017-02-18 18:42:52

You could always just ban the accounts that have a single "hello this is nice post click here for cheap printer ink and available hot single women in [LOCATION_CITY]" forum post and nothing more.

ChiraBeats · 2017-02-18 21:30:24

I do, that doesn't stop new ones from popping up unfortunately. The worst I can do towards a bot is an IP ban. Fortunately, the honeypot I set up seems to be working just fine against them now.

Deleted user #158 · 2017-02-19 16:44:36

paperpenguin wrote:

You could always just ban the accounts that have a single "hello this is nice post click here for cheap printer ink and available hot single women in [LOCATION_CITY]" forum post and nothing more.

hahaha nice example! XD

T145 · 2017-02-20 13:13:10

Why not limit forum posts for new accounts until they verify an e-mail or something? Also has the nice secondary function of making sure that you got the right e-mail.

Last edited by T145 (2017-02-20 13:13:20)

ChiraBeats · 2017-02-20 16:18:06

Most bots I've seen have no problems with email verification. Could be good for delaying human spammers though.

Syoubat · 2017-03-09 04:29:55

o.o everytime i hear "spam" online i think of a tasty treat then i get disappointed because bots

HayaiShinzouNeko · 2017-03-09 22:32:09

I used something like this on my old forum. Instead it was a simple question where the answer was usually given to you in the question.

It was fun to see a bot answer: "What is the name of this site called Infinite Unreality?" with stuff like "Uganda" or any other random country.

Cardiorotica · 2017-04-20 06:46:37

what about to intergrate a CHAPTA in the signon ? these days you have picture CHAPTAS. easy to make and the bots wont get through. On my wordpress site i had an average of 500 attempts a day to login as admin. i put all kinds of protection stuff. try to block the login php. had a module that blocked the ip of every user that try to login with wrong password after 1 time, or block the ip of users that try to login with none existing user names ...
then i was like.. lets put a CHAPTA. since then i have 1 maybe 2 attempts a day...
it might be solution here ?

Good luck

ChiraBeats · 2017-04-23 21:18:57

Thought about that, but decided against it. Or, decided against reCAPTCHA anyway. Don't feel like contributing to Google's machine learning image recognition stuff. Surprisingly, just switching up the form seems to have worked on every bot that's come across us so far. At least all the ones who do actual spamming.

T145 · 2017-04-25 16:03:28

ChiraBeats wrote:

Thought about that, but decided against it. Or, decided against reCAPTCHA anyway. Don't feel like contributing to Google's machine learning image recognition stuff. Surprisingly, just switching up the form seems to have worked on every bot that's come across us so far. At least all the ones who do actual spamming.

To be fair, the majority of those bots are just generic ones, so changing up the form trips them up, for a while, at least.

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#1 2017-02-18 10:52:14

No more spam, please.

#2 2017-02-18 12:48:18

Re: No more spam, please.

#3 2017-02-18 17:10:15

Re: No more spam, please.

#4 2017-02-18 18:42:52

Re: No more spam, please.

#5 2017-02-18 21:30:24

Re: No more spam, please.

#6 2017-02-19 16:44:36

Re: No more spam, please.

#7 2017-02-20 13:13:10

Re: No more spam, please.

#8 2017-02-20 16:18:06

Re: No more spam, please.

#9 2017-03-09 04:29:55

Re: No more spam, please.

#10 2017-03-09 22:32:09

Re: No more spam, please.

#11 2017-04-20 06:46:37

Re: No more spam, please.

#12 2017-04-23 21:18:57

Re: No more spam, please.

#13 2017-04-25 16:03:28

Re: No more spam, please.

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