God damned spam

roxaz · Post by **roxaz** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 1:50 pm

It is annoying huh? I think we could easyly stop this crap simply by adding small modification to forum. I think that something like mathematical exercise solving would be great. Here is small example. Lets say i want to write a post, somewhere there should be an image with mathematical exercise (2+2 in example) and input for answer (4 in our case). So to post we must to solve this exercise. I used myself GD library to make monster spawn locations on the map image dynamicly. GD is realy easy and useful stuff. So what do you think about it?

omaremad · Post by **omaremad** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 10:22 pm

Except some spam is made by paid humans!

liger13 · Post by **liger13** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 1:55 am

that would be a boring job... answering small equations all day to get money

Spintz · Post by **Spintz** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 2:35 am

Change forum software is only way to stop the spam. I've moved all my forums over to SMF and since then, have no spam anymore. All the forum auto-spammers are setup for phpBB, as it's the most popular.

roxaz · Post by **roxaz** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 6:00 am

anyway few modifications would stop them. i gues forum information is too valuable to leave, is there any forum databases converter from one to another?

Klasker · Post by **Klasker** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 6:43 am

On my website which also uses phpBB I added another CAPTCHA for filtering out bots. My site is related Warcraft 3 so I chose to display an image of a Grunt and force people to type the name of the unit shown on the image (during registration, during guest posting and during first registered post). After that the spam went from 2-3 messages per day to no spam whatsoever. I haven't seen any spam there for months now.

I think something really simple would do the trick - maybe just show Irrlicht's logo and tell people to write the name of the engine in the box.

roxaz · Post by **roxaz** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 7:12 am

this is not a solution. even noob php programmer would be able to tune spammer a bit if needed extra information (like engine name) is static. dynamic stuff is the sollution

Spintz · Post by **Spintz** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 12:35 pm

Yes, there is a converter that converts phpBB database to SMF. Would need to be very careful though, because the database access on Sourceforge( which these forums use ) sucks, it's very slow and unreliable, hence why these forums are sporatically unavailable. With as large as this database is, the forums would need to be down for a bit, while the conversion took place. Shouldn't be too bad though.

roxaz · Post by **roxaz** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 12:56 pm

now we have to poke with a stick someone who can do that. anybody knows who that guy might be? maybe Acki?

kburkhart84 · Post by **kburkhart84** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 1:16 pm

Klasker wrote:On my website which also uses phpBB I added another CAPTCHA for filtering out bots. My site is related Warcraft 3 so I chose to display an image of a Grunt and force people to type the name of the unit shown on the image (during registration, during guest posting and during first registered post). After that the spam went from 2-3 messages per day to no spam whatsoever. I haven't seen any spam there for months now.

I think something really simple would do the trick - maybe just show Irrlicht's logo and tell people to write the name of the engine in the box.

This is probably the better way to do it, except dynamically. You can't complain if you have to do it a couple of times and since usually the spammers register and make one post, it would cover them. Also, a registered name that doesn't make a post within a certain amount of time(maybe 24hours) should be deleted. This way, if the spam post fails since it didn't get past the picture thing above, the registered name won't remain. We don't have this problem now because the mods see the spam and can delete manually the registered name, but if somehow we block the spam, the registered names would still remain, so we need to address that part as well.

roxaz · Post by **roxaz** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 2:29 pm

you cant say that we dont have this problem now. yes, mods see the spam and delete it but they waste their time.

xDan · Post by **xDan** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 2:40 pm

The indiegamer.com forum does not allow posting for ~48 hours after registration.

Klasker · Post by **Klasker** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 6:28 pm

roxaz wrote:this is not a solution. even noob php programmer would be able to tune spammer a bit if needed extra information (like engine name) is static. dynamic stuff is the sollution

It doesn't need to be dynamic - it just needs to be unique to this site. The spam programmers can't (and won't) write their bots to defeat CAPTCHAs that only appear on a single phpBB site that they probably don't even know about. They are specifically attacking the solutions available on phpBB's website, such as text image recognition, which is why the "good" solutions don't work. Suppose a really powerful text recognition CATPCHA was available on phpBB.com, lots of forums will be using that and defeating it will be high priority for the spambot programmers. Anyone could write a bot that defeats the simple Irrlicht Logo CAPTCHA, but nobody is going to do it because it just appears on this small site (small as in, not noticed by the spambot programmers).

roxaz · Post by **roxaz** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 9:53 pm

if spammer is interested in spaming exactly here he can do small patch by himself. as i used php-fusion for my site i kept it patching on and on to fit my requirements. spamers are same

Midnight · Post by **Midnight** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 2:26 am

answering trivial questions before posting a topic pisses me off deluxe.

much more then the spam.

don't fix something with a worse solution unless your a politician.