OMG! All the spam!

edited in Association News
Hi Everyone,

Just to let you know we are aware of the spam that's occurring on the forums and we're busy implementing a strategy (i.e. plug-in) to prevent it.

Please just ignore the spam for now and we'll delete it as soon as we notice it.

Comments

  • Any progress on this? The spam is getting spammier...
    Thanked by 1Elyaradine
  • And smarter! The previous one had "Space Invader" in it and sounded like an argument :P
  • Figured out today how to update the registration page (MVC got confused between the PHP files and my backups) and I'm implementing a human check to prevent more spam.
  • I run a bunch of forums with various methods of spam checking and by far the most effective method, winning over captchas and google's recaptcha and 'are you human' games and math puzzles, is a Q&A personalised to the site. I have an indie games phpbb forum with 11.5k members and after a tonne of trial and error the only current spam prevention method is a question that's very relevant to the forum as most of our members are there for our Minecraft server: 'Who's the creator of Minecraft?'. The answer accepts Notch, Markus Persson and a few variations of nicknames and case. It's googlable, so in theory a bot could answer it, but it seems to keep them out. We get one spammer every few months. Anyway - just imparting my experience, maybe it'll help :)
    Thanked by 1Nitrogen
  • Another cool method is to use a honey pot field that is hidden from view by normal users via css, but the bots dont know that and they fill it it as if it's part of the signup form!
    Thanked by 1francoisvn
  • There is now a human check on the registration page of the forums that should stop most of the spam.

    It took me forever because the MVC model the forums use were using my backup .old files instead of the .php files and I spent days trying to figure out why none of the edits I made were working.
  • edited
    OK.

    Now one more issue.

    Batman's Superhero Name.

    I thought it was a trick question - so I enter Batman......

    You don't appear to be human...

    =(
  • edited
    I've removed case sensitivity from the check, please can you ask morugankodi to try again. It is indeed Batman or batman or BATMAN or even BaTMaN but not "the batman" or any other derivative.
  • That does seem a bit of a trick question.

    Legion Ink uses a honey pot and an ip registration email checker as well as a "rotate these pictures so they're upright to prove you're a human", of the 3, the various "prove you're human" options have always been the one people fall over with.

    We still get a few human registered bots, but they're easy enough to pick off with the email/username/ip checker once they're recorded in a spammer db.

    In the 2-3 years we've had these running together we've only had 4 false positives due to dynamic ip shifts or really short usernames so I'd recommend a team of plugins like that.
  • Whew.... finally - I have passed through the Batman Guarded Gates to Mordor.
  • Yay! welcome aboard!
  • It is indeed Batman or batman or BATMAN or even BaTMaN but not "the batman" or any other derivative.
    I would have said Dark Knight
  • OK, I've changed it to a honeypot so lets see if it stops the bots
  • Bots are not falling for the honeypot so I've gone back to the human check but I've made it a dropdown with other DC characters so it should be easier to complete.
  • edited
    are the culprits new registrations though?

    I think this is the vanilla equiv of the plugin we're finding most effective (redacted for security) do you have something like it already?
  • I've just installed it! Thanks for the link
  • :)

    I recommend checking the current memberlist against the db to weed out any sleepers as well if you haven't already.
  • that's a little harder but I want to
Sign In or Register to comment.