Forums / Maintenance / Suggest Ideas

Many recent spambots and concerned users have made me ponder of ideas to get rid of spambots. Before this is locked please post any ideas you have that might help with spambots.
1.ban i.p. Addresses
2. Have to have users verified by mods.
Feel free to post more.

• We do ban IP addresses. There are a lot of IP addresses out there, though.
• We've discussed this option before, but decided that it's way more work compared with just deleting and banning spambots. We also decided that it might discourage some people from joining, which is something we don't want to do.

On a related note. Has anyone noticed how bad the spam-bot's messages are getting?

Yes and they also keep on repeating themselves over and over again. It makes knowing and finding them easy but come on, can they at least try something different. Oh well, at least things haven't gone has bad as last time. Just seeing that thread makes me glad that I wasn't a member at that time.

As opspe mentioned, we did have several discussions about dealing with the spambots. it's probably the main why reason KYM enlists so many mods.

We've tried a couple things, such as upgrading the captcha. But at the end of the day, they always find their way around us and keep coming back and spoof their IP addresses every time.

On the other hand, while I was working in the new web design firm I signed up with; I noticed that the business uses math based captchas as opposed to image captchas

You rarely see math based capcha's, but I have heard of them and people say they are more effective.

Image captchas are insanely easy for bots to decode. They do it automatically in a few seconds. But bot's still don't yet know how to read a simple asked question such as "What is two plus two?"

No seriously. It works because bots are machines and machines follow code, not comprehend english

So that's one solution I am going to throw out here. It still wont stop spam because some spammers have indian sweatshops that pay human beings 2 cents for every cracked captcha…but it might throw off the more advanced ones that try to decode captchas automatically and expect only the standard stuff

[edit]

Oh, and I'm also still plugging my other great anti-spam idea: Maximum registration form entry speed.

Start a JS powered timer from the moment the registration page is accessed and time how long it takes for the registration to complete and the next request is sent with filled details.

If the next request takes longer to arrive than 5 seconds, it's probably a human

If it takes only 0.05 seconds afterwards with completely filled details, it's a bot. Autoban

I also have an idea!. Don't allow certain words from being used in thread titles.