Stop the bots!

dankicksass · Post by **dankicksass** » Tue May 09, 2006 1:07 am

I've been here for about three weeks. I've seen the forums go down with errors numerous times, and I've seen these spambots post here more than I have on any other site, ever, except for blog comments. There's a simple solution for this: use image-text registration verification. Even Yahoo uses it. And phpbb has support for it.

That's what I'm talking about, to be clear.
This would stop the spambots completely, and make mods' jobs easier. It would stop the spambot-caused forum errors and outages too.

Lucretius · Post by **Lucretius** » Tue May 09, 2006 4:47 am

Make an earnest plea to Ben to make this change. Maybe he'll listen if the entire community asks him to do it...

gamemasterAS · Post by **gamemasterAS** » Tue May 09, 2006 5:06 am

I hope we do change it, but if we do will we all nead to re register Â¿

Lucretius · Post by **Lucretius** » Tue May 09, 2006 5:07 am

No, but the new members or bots will have a tougher time then you did!

PancakeGoblin · Post by **PancakeGoblin** » Tue May 09, 2006 5:48 am

Just to let you know, its been around for a while....I signed up and it was there.

blackbox_dev · Post by **blackbox_dev** » Tue May 09, 2006 6:49 am

Yeah, that new member Xboxfan is one of my friends at school. When he signed up (on a school computer), he needed to enter that image confirmation code).

Post by **Sparkfist** » Tue May 09, 2006 7:20 am

We know that the "enter text" is better for keeping bots out, but hey some are smarter then others. We've looked at other choices, so rest asured we know about the problem and are working to resolve it.

If you have an idea that could improve the securty against bots, PM/email one of us mods or Ben himself with the idea.

NES_fanatic · Post by **NES_fanatic** » Tue May 09, 2006 7:29 am

Let's just ask for race, eye color, and blood type and be done with it.

Post by **gannon** » Tue May 09, 2006 4:11 pm

CAPTCHA's don't work well, there are libraries out there that can defeat them with over a 95% success rate. Also, a few "spam bots" are people who are paid to do it manually.

Harshboy · Post by **Harshboy** » Tue May 09, 2006 5:57 pm

O noes, the bots have brains....but seariously, they have to be stopped, i hate them!

PancakeGoblin · Post by **PancakeGoblin** » Tue May 09, 2006 6:09 pm

They're very hard to stop. OCR readers are easy to make (look at Neopets, unless they changed since I quit, all hacking programs have an OCR to bypass this at login).

Also, theres the "play the sound for me" things. The computer can just send itself the sound, figure out whats said by wave, and get it.

Or, humans can make the account and let the thing spam when its logged in.