Server Help

[Cerium]

What method(s) do you use to go about fighting the plethora of spambots which assault forums setup like this?

Every day I find myself having to delete 1-2 fake usernames who register just to have a link posted in their 'homepage' field. If that wasnt enough, periodically I have one of them post under a guest to spam a couple hundred links.

I dont see that happening here very often, yet we have the same (basic) setup. What have you changed in your version that makes it relatively secure from spam?
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There are 7 user(s) ignoring me right now.

[CypherJF]

omega fire forums have the same issue; i have a phpBB hack that lets me mass-edit/delete users on a whim.
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Performance is often the art of cheating carefully. - James Gosling

[Smong]

I think you can check the useragent to see if it's blank and also rename form variables so bots can't use forms such as register or post.

[CypherJF]

maybe i didn't implement it correctly; I added a checkbox that they need/should have to click in order to create an account and there should also be a captcha box. :shrug:

[SpecShip*]

[CypherJF]

pruning doesnt affect user accounts, does it?

[SpecShip*]

If by affect you mean ban, then no.
If by affect you mean del all posts, then yes.

[CypherJF]

I don't want to delete posts; I just want to delete known account's that are spammers. I knew about the pruning of topics etc etc but regarding user del/ban etc options phpBB doesnt have a quick way of doing it so using that bulk edit-user hack is pretty nice.

[Animate Dreams]

Maybe, people just aren't interested in MGB forums. I mean, they aren't very big, so advertising won't get a lot done, and some of the people here can not only forum ban you, but take your IP and ban you from SS(It makes sense that they could, anyway), and no one that's not an SS player is going to hear of these forums anyway. Or such is my theory.

[Mine GO BOOM]

He is talking about bots that go around and auto-post in every phpbb forum or every wiki. My best fix, as even renaming posting.php to makemessage.php didn't stop everything, was the little useless checkbox. Its there whenever you attempt to post as a guest user or sign up for the ASSS Wiki. The only code for it is the error checking if it wasn't checked. So far, not a single bot has gotten by that.

Since I have guest posting enabled, no bots even attempt to register here. Another not-so-successful anti-spam feature I tried was checking the referral. Almost every single spam bot or human attempting to mass spam has the referral being the exact page they are loading. Well, makemessage.php has no link to itself, so technically, you can never visit that page and have the referral being that page with a GET (POST doesn't count). But, problems occurred because for some stupid reason, some people's browsers here do exactly that. If you look at the source on makemessage.php, you'll still notice my testing for referrals. With every post it stores the originally referral for that message, which was how I was able to determine which idiot users caused problems.

It is still enabled and on every person's post, I still have a small light-orange colored text with the person's referral. It doesn't actually do me any good, but too lazy to remove it and its interesting seeing how many people actually browse with their referrals blocked all the time. Oh no! The secret haxors will catch me because I'm sending referrals!!

[Cerium]

Unless the permissions on this server allow me to navigate out of my root, I dont believe I will be viewing the source for your modified makemessage.php.

The biggest problem I was having was with the bots generating fake users. This kinda slowed down now that I enabled the captcha 'verification', but some still get by. Ive rarely had to deal with the bots using the guest posting, so deleting them hasnt started to bother me yet, but if it does Ill definately implement the checkbox idea.

[Mine GO BOOM]

[Muskrat]

Wow, porn people are pretty keen.

[SpecShip]

[Cerium]

[D1st0rt]

You could try something like hashcash that makes them calculate something before they can get to anything. Might slow them down, at any rate
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[Doc Flabby]

I think the only answer to make sure it was a human would be a Captcha such as this:

http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=398147

http://www.kessels.com/captcha/

[Cyan~Fire]

Uhh even I can't read some of those. Are the flashing letters part of the code or not?
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This help is informational only. No representation is made or warranty given as to its content. User assumes all risk of use. Cyan~Fire assumes no responsibility for any loss or delay resulting from such use.
Wise men STILL seek Him.

[Smong]

Depends on how it is configured I think. In some certain characters are only visible at certain times, the interesting ones animate slower.

[Maurauth]

You're so boring you might as well be a bot, arolas.

[SpecShip]

His name is...arolas?

[Purge]

[Maverick]

[Solo Ace]

How about a question only Continuum people can answer, that's not hard to do and you don't need lots of questions. I don't think people who spam forums even bother to find out.

In Continuum, what's the ship's name for ESC+{[1-8]}1?
With the default key mappings, what function does 'Delete' have?

I don't know, that last one was stupid, but you get the point.

I think my proxy used to be hiding referrals, but that's a long time ago.

And.. uh gotta go.

[SpecShip]

In SubSpace, what's the title of someone who calls the game Continuum?