What to do against bots.

[Chroelle]

And again another one... This one is propably tied to X-Moto just being suggested on our site.
I wonder how they breach currently...?

[Pater Alf]

Wouldn't it be good to delete or at least lock the topic? And the other bot posts as well?

[Chroelle]

Yes I simply wanted to keep this one for posterity so Zyx could see it. I am guessing it would help him form a pattern as to what to do to protect the site from these spamming members...
So Zyx when you see this please delete it when done with it.

[Zyx]

Anyone with mod capabilities can just delete the posts and ban the user (eventhough the bot won't come back). Nothing new here. I guess we need to add "Write the word 'orange' here:" validation to the registration form or something.

[Moogle]

Anyone with mod capabilities can just delete the posts and ban the user (eventhough the bot won't come back). Nothing new here. I guess we need to add "Write the word 'orange' here:" validation to the registration form or something.

Agreed.

[Chroelle]

I think we need to be careful to write the word in the text, so it should more be like:

The name of the big yellow thing in the sky that provides light and warmth - the...

This way people would write "sun" and not "the sun".
OR it could be something with a number like it is currently, as that removes the problem with bad spellers.

[Zyx]

I think we need to be careful to write the word in the text, so it should more be like:

The bots do not have that advanced AI, they know how a default phpbb3 install works and anything out of ordinary will defeat them. Hopefully.

[Chroelle]

But dont we already have something out of the ordinary?

[Pater Alf]

I deleted the bot posts by stiffanbond. Will delete everything else I see. Wouldn't it be good to rename this topic? Maybe to something like "What to do against the bots?"? I tried to but couldn't do it because the original first post was deleted.

[Chroelle]

That should do it.

[Zyx]

But dont we already have something out of the ordinary?

Unfortunately not anymore. The recaptcha thing ("type the two words in the images into the boxes") are a bit broken, not because bots have finally achieved perfect vision, but because they outsource their solving in real-time to India (as insane as it sounds). The bots recognize that there's an image in a phpbb3 registration page where they expect it to be, so they probably need to solve that problem in order to gain access.

So, instead of bots gaining better machine vision, they just sidestep the whole problem and let a human solve the thing. That would make a nice sci-fi story, if it wasn't true.

However, a simple 'type the word monkey in the box' defeats this as computers' reading comprehension skills still suck and it's something that's only in our board, which the bots don't know about in advance. They just use google to find sites that are running phpbb3.

[Chroelle]

A little off topic, but I am not sure if it doesn't have something to do with this.
Can anyone tell me what is wrongwith my signature bbcode? It seems I cannot get this to work, so either I am not looking correctly at it, or there is now a lock in sigs regarding URL's...

[Drasir-Vel]

I also noticed it. It seems it doesn't recognize an [url=http://www.paed-it.dk]URL[/url] in signatures

try inserting this directly:

[url=http://www.paed-it.dk]www.paed-it.dk - My blog in Danish[/url]

it worked with me. see if you have the same settings.

[Chroelle]

Dont know why but somehow I got "disable bbcode" marked down. Must have been an error on my part at some time. Now it all makes sense again.
Thanks for making me aware DV.

[Maz]

there's small checkbox where you write your signature stating disable bbcode. Checked as default. Uncheck and retry.

[Chroelle]

I got it working. I wonder how come it worked for me before - perhaps because I made my old sig in the old board, and so when I edited it in the new board it suddenly didn't read bbcode as it by default was unchecked in the new boards settings.

[Maz]

yes. That sounds correct

[Drasir-Vel]

It seems there was some bot spamvertizing the different forums. I took the liberty of banning it, and deleting the posts. This time it was one called terry magar.

[Pater Alf]

There was a bot in this anti-bot thread. Must've been very brave or very suicidal...

[eMTe]

Brave, suicidal, probably very fragile, intelligent, unhappy, depressed and very romantic. Most likely driven by inner sorrow, having complicated past and strong views on internet world and his life. We dont get many tragic bots. Pity he had to die and I havent got a chance to meet him in his virtual person.

*sniff*