Tony Posted March 24, 2010 Report Posted March 24, 2010 Just thought I'd point out we've now hit the 1000 member mark on the forums. Unfortunately though the majority of them are bots Quote
Fowler Posted March 24, 2010 Report Posted March 24, 2010 Congratulations (i suppose) Have you tried a modification/add-on that integrates stopforumspam.com into the registration system? If you disable the username checks then the number of false positives is really low (if any). Quote
Tony Posted March 24, 2010 Author Report Posted March 24, 2010 The real problem now is them signing up leaving signatures and home pages. We tried a few plugins and most of them did not even work and the ones that did were not helpful. We'll be switching over to IPB soon like on the Frog Host forums. Quote
Fowler Posted March 24, 2010 Report Posted March 24, 2010 Nice, IPB is alot better then VB (especially vb 4) in my opinion. I find the way vb treat their customers is a disgrace aswell especially with the vb 4 release. Quote
speedturtle Posted March 27, 2010 Report Posted March 27, 2010 Unfortunately though the majority of them are bots lemon168 seems to be the latest bot. How did these bots get past the recaptcha? I thought recaptcha is virtually impossible to crack. Quote
Tony Posted March 27, 2010 Author Report Posted March 27, 2010 lemon168 seems to be the latest bot. How did these bots get past the recaptcha? I thought recaptcha is virtually impossible to crack. I have no idea and some of them are manual. Someone will sign up to to get by the captcha stuff then make a post or a bot will then make the posts. Quote
rezzy Posted March 29, 2010 Report Posted March 29, 2010 Somehow the bots are able to get their way around the captcha. I have sites where I use the captcha and they are able to spam around them. Quote
Fowler Posted March 29, 2010 Report Posted March 29, 2010 ReCaptcha is not as effective as it was i found. A more custom CAPTCHA or visual confirmation method will stop alot. Alot of the members look to be bots from their activities. Quote
Tony Posted March 29, 2010 Author Report Posted March 29, 2010 You'll notice they always put in a ICQ number as well as location and a few other pieces of information. Since we added an avatar option a lot of them do that as well. For example: http://forums.hawkhost.com/member.php?u=1033 You get ones with just an avatar: http://forums.hawkhost.com/member.php?u=923 Or both: http://forums.hawkhost.com/member.php?u=723 The best part is the same avatar pictures over and over again. Quote
Fowler Posted March 29, 2010 Report Posted March 29, 2010 That is what makes me think they are bots. A human wouldn't waste all their time doing that and putting up a bio, avatar & ICQ number. Especially if they are not going to post like alot here. I have managed to get spam down to about 1 or 2 a day now (if that) which is manageable. I blame the people who create software (like XRumer) who claim that they hate spam yet create a software which people use for that reason. Quote
Tony Posted March 29, 2010 Author Report Posted March 29, 2010 That is what makes me think they are bots. A human wouldn't waste all their time doing that and putting up a bio, avatar & ICQ number. Especially if they are not going to post like alot here. What I think is not bots is the signing up portion. Although it's just some of them it seems that way other times it's entirely a bot. Almost like there are a few variations of the groups. The none bot ones always post and always the same sites. That's what makes me think they're not entirely bots. What's also interesting is the same bots who visit our forum also visit some forums we have links on. So the LiteSpeed forum which is a PR6 has the same bots as our site and we're a PR5. Oh well though probably won't be using vbulletin much longer anyways. Our license expires on July 18th and the biggest hurdle for us is migrating the site code to read IPB rather than vbulletin. Though Frog Host already has the code for doing this so not a huge deal there either. Quote
Tony Posted March 30, 2010 Author Report Posted March 30, 2010 So we're trying the spam monitoring service on the frog host forum. Granted not as high traffic but very neat anyways since a bot visited both forums. http://forums.hawkhost.com/member.php?u=1034 I manually banned them http://forums.froghost.com/index.php?//user/12-xboatsailorz/ Spam service I guess banned them since I don't think any of us banned them. Quote
speedturtle Posted March 30, 2010 Report Posted March 30, 2010 The best part is the same avatar pictures over and over again. Maybe they're twins / triplets / quadruplets / quintuplets / sextuplets / septuplets / octuplets / nonuplets / ... / N-tuplets ? Quote
netsavy006 Posted July 7, 2010 Report Posted July 7, 2010 Congrats on the 1000 members, even if some are bots. Quote
Johnny26 Posted July 20, 2010 Report Posted July 20, 2010 Congrats. I would suggest you add up more security measure to insure bots to register. Quote
Tony Posted July 20, 2010 Author Report Posted July 20, 2010 Congrats. I would suggest you add up more security measure to insure bots to register. Funny thing I believe you're a bot. I've seen that picture on several profiles on our forum Quote
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