Forums / Maintenance / Suggest Ideas

So, I've been thinking of a few possible solutions to the bot problem KYM's been having. I don't know much about how bots work, so these may either be helpful or useless. Here are my ideas.

As KYM is an English-speaking forum, with other languages only showing up in jokes or spam, it might be helpful to only allow English in the titles. It'd help stop the Korean bots, given they only use Korean and enough English to give us the URL.

There could be some modest requirements for posting in the forums. Can only post after being a member for one hour, need a profile image, have to reply to another thread before you can make one, that kind of thing – low enough that anyone who wants to post in the forums can after a small amount of time, but high enough that it'd at least slow down a bot.

A program to detect and prevent duplicate threads would likely do a lot to help with things like yesterday's wave of spam.. It'd stint their ability to spam, and likely help moderators keep them in check.

I like the idea of only being able to post after one hour. That alone will probably help a lot with spam, especially if any of the bots are automated.
I'm kind of against the banning of non-Latin characters, though. It'd only prevent the Korean spammers (who will probably leave after a while anyways), and plus we need foreign characters sometimes for meme research.
As for requiring a user to have a profile picture – no. That would be pretty inconvenient for any new people. Requiring new users to post at least once would probably just get spammers to post in random threads, so I doubt that would help, either.

A program to detect and prevent duplicate threads would likely do a lot to help with things like yesterday’s wave of spam.. It’d stint their ability to spam, and likely help moderators keep them in check.

A bot that detects duplicate threads would also be pretty useful. Hell, I could make one, if necessary.

It's been a while since I signed up, but is there an email verification? Or maybe one of those human tests where you type letters you see in a photograph?

I’m kind of against the banning of non-Latin characters, though. It’d only prevent the Korean spammers (who will probably leave after a while anyways), and plus we need foreign characters sometimes for meme research.

I meant only in the titles for the posts, but I can see how that would be a problem.

It’s been a while since I signed up, but is there an email verification? Or maybe one of those human tests where you type letters you see in a photograph?

It's been a while for me too, but I don't think it had captcha.

One post per hour is definitely a good idea, I can't really think of a reason why you would need to post more than that.

Also, if you do make a bot, I suggest naming it Dubtron.

There's Email verification, along with a commercial you're forced to watch to find out an answer to a question:

It's sort of like captcha and it makes big bucks for cheezburger.

After looking at the requirements for joining, I'm beginning to think that the vast majority of spammers are actually real people rather than bots. Writing a bot requires skill (especially with the spam barriers put up by KYM), and if your company is doing so badly that you're forced to advertise on a meme site, then chances are you aren't making enough cash to hire a spambot creator.
Not only that, but KYM is pretty good at IP banning bots. I learned that the hard way.
That being said, when deciding how to handle spammers, we should think of them as people rather than bots.

What I meant to convey was that you wouldn't be able to comment (either in forums only or all KYM would be for the moderators to decide) for an hour after you join, as most spammers post spam within a few minutes of joining and are taken down minutes after. Also, when first checking the forums, I may post several times in a few minutes, and active threads and discussions can lead to posts very close together. Unless you mean creating threads, in which case that's reasonable, but unhelpful, as each bot seems to only post once before getting shut down most of the time.