!!! SPAMBOTS !!!

[samjc3]

Those 'bots' are built in. They index the forums so they come up in Google and Yahoos search results.

there are also adsense bots that look at everything so the banner ads are fitting for the website? right? that way there arent any lingerie ads

[baybuddy123]

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[bicostp]

Oh, the irony.

[Life of Brian]

^That made my day

[SpongeBuell]

Yeah, we had that happen once already in this thread

[Life of Brian]

You don't suppose it's attracting them like a bug zapper, do you?

[ShockSlayer]

E-bug-zapper.... awesome.

SS

[nitro2k01]

ReCaptcha seems to be the best option, as it is used professionally and seems to work very well. Spambots don't have eyes, anyway.

Oh they do. If you had any idea how advanced spam technology is these days. I saw a demonstration video for an automatic spammer where they demonstrated how it tackled most kinds of common captcha. ReCaptcha however has the benefit of being centralized so it can detect IP addresses that tries to sign up for different sites.
And additionally, not all spam comes from bots. On my blog I have a little hack that uses javascript to block bot spam, which has singled out a few IRL spammers. They've always come from Google searches, and they've been from either Sri Lanka, Afghanistan or som Middle East countries. Ie poor people who were hired to post spam.

[XCVG]

ReCaptcha seems to be the best option, as it is used professionally and seems to work very well. Spambots don't have eyes, anyway.

Oh they do. If you had any idea how advanced spam technology is these days. I saw a demonstration video for an automatic spammer where they demonstrated how it tackled most kinds of common captcha. ReCaptcha however has the benefit of being centralized so it can detect IP addresses that tries to sign up for different sites.
And additionally, not all spam comes from bots. On my blog I have a little hack that uses javascript to block bot spam, which has singled out a few IRL spammers. They've always come from Google searches, and they've been from either Sri Lanka, Afghanistan or som Middle East countries. Ie poor people who were hired to post spam.

Ugh, I hate ReCaptcha. Would it kill them to make the letters/numbers READABLE?!

[Twilight Wolf]

Um, that's kind of the point. If they're hard to read, the bots' text-identification ability is severely hindered, thus blocking them out.

[jleemero]

Smart dude's suggestion:

A great way to ward off bots is with simple HTML+CSS tricks. You create two HTML form fields named "username" and "password" and then hide them with CSS. Then you create two more fields and give them random names. The randomly-named fields will be used as the user's chosen username and password. The hidden fields will be used as spam traps: if they are filled in, the registration is rejected.

Yeah, I like that way.

[Twilight Wolf]

Could work, but I think it has too much potential to just confuse people. Then again, I might just be thinking too far into it...

[Black Six]

Could work, but I think it has too much potential to just confuse people. Then again, I might just be thinking too far into it...

How would it confuse people? They'd only see two fields, the other two would be hidden.

[Twilight Wolf]

Actually, I think I get it now. (My comprehension probably wasn't that stellar at 5:00 AM.)

Any human user who wants to sign up would only see the two randomly-named fields, not fields marked "Username" and "Password"; specialised directions on the signup page ("The field marked 'broccoli' is where you enter your username") would tell people what to enter in each field. The fields marked "Username" and "Password" are hidden to human users, but the bots can "see" these fields because they're programmed to... read the coding... or something. (I'm probably way off about that.)

Is that basically right? Or did I epically misunderstand it?

[jjhammerstein]

The boxes have "Username" and "Password" next to them, but they aren't labeled as such in HTML.