Out, damn 'bots!

[BasiliskWrangler]

I'm going to tighten the account activation process today because of the ridiculous amounts of 'bots that are making accounts and posting messages about cheap valium and enormous <XXX> .

Sorry for the inconvenience!

[Sanctus]

yeah I noticed some of them to
Well good luck getting rid of em

[Rollor]

arghh i havn't been on enough lately to see the bots

anyway here's a link to prevent thingy, i don't know much about stuff like that:/
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3983&start=0

[BasiliskWrangler]

Nice one, Rollor! We'll give it a try.

Don't worry about your absence; it's been slow on the boards lately. We've got the "all work and no play" thing going on right now....

[Fleisch]

I'm going to tighten the account activation process today because of the ridiculous amounts of 'bots that are making accounts and posting messages about cheap valium and enormous <XXX> .

Based on the addresses that appear when I hover over the home websites of some of our "members" (so to speak ), there are bots among us, but they seem to have been effectively silenced, since I haven't seen them posting anything.

[BasiliskWrangler]

Yeah, I've noticed we've had a lot of bots join us lately. I used to delete the accounts that were obvious bots, but they just signed back up a week later. As long as they don't spam the boards, I just ignore them.

[BasiliskWrangler]

I did a HUGE pruning of accounts today. I deleted all accounts with zero posts who also had questionable email addresses or web page links. I scrubbed nearly 60 accounts.

My deepest apologies if I deleted your account by accident. I will keep up on account maintenance better from now on. These bogus accounts take up disk space, slow down the server, eat bandwidth and make the boards less attractive to legitimate users.

Also, I added some code to block anonymous viewing of account profiles so that bots can't see your email address. If anything appears broken, please let me know.

[BasiliskWrangler]

Okay- new ANTI-SPAM code was added to the forums today, so hopefully we'll see no more (or at least less) junk posts.

If anyone has trouble registering a new account, please send us an email and let us know about it.

[BasiliskWrangler]

Well you cant always win

Damn it!

[txa1265]

Okay- new ANTI-SPAM code was added to the forums today, so hopefully we'll see no more (or at least less) junk posts.

If anyone has trouble registering a new account, please send us an email and let us know about it.

It is really sad the extent to which this happens ... a site for a nice little GBA RPG (Mazes of Fate) completely shut down their forums because they were getting massively spammed with XXX crap.

[Rollor]

Well sadly pretty much every forum now adays has lots of spambots
Not much to do other than delete delete and delete .. Pretty triesome for the mods and admins...

[BasiliskWrangler]

Okay, we finally got some code in place that should thwart spambots. Of course the last time I said this we had 10 spam posts within 4 hours, so only time will tell how effective this new modification is!

So far, after [edit] 24 hours, not a single 'bot registration or post! As always, if anyone sees any problems or has difficulty creating a legitimate account, please email us.

[Elveronion]

Heh, looks like that might have worked, havent seen any spammer bots for like 2 days now. that is some kind of record!!

[GSV3MiaC]

Looks like a pretty clean board to me, so congratulations to the moderator(s).

[If I were running the planet, spamming would be a capital offense (Ok, maybe for first occurrence we just cut off enough bits to remove the offender from the gene pool).]

[BasiliskWrangler]

Are you planning on tightening the account activation process sometime in the future BasiliskWrangler? I'm always reporting bots several times a week. Most of them are obvious with their inane posts and website links in their signatures but some people are naive and respond to them.

The process is never ending. I change the sign-up process a few times per year to keep the validation question different. I block the IP addresses of spammers when we see them, sometimes even blocking subnet ranges when I see a lot of bot traffic coming from the same region.

What you and others are doing now is perfect: just file a report when new spam posts are made. I get sent a note which allows me to deal with them more quickly: specifically, destroy the account and block the IP address.