Spambots at the forum

dolby · 2007-02-19 08:22:22

i recently joined a forum where upon register u had the fill in a question eg. "are you human?" as a nessecary field in order to prevent spambots from registering to the forum. i was wondering if that could happen here. i am not active in that many forums but this is the only one which seems to have so many problems of this kind

phrakture · 2007-02-19 17:43:22

That's probably doable. There's many techniques to defeating spambots, but we don't want to accidentally limit the normal users. I think the Forum Advisors do a great job of cleaning up spam (note: there is a 'report spam' button on posts).

bangkok_manouel · 2007-02-19 17:52:03

and spambots always post in the off-topic section... that is very polite.

dtw · 2007-02-19 19:28:13

One of the main reason I advocated a change away from phpbb was that the poor spam prevention. The captcha tech in phpbb (when you have to read and input the obscured code to register) has been shown to be crackable about 2 in every three attempts with existing software. This is obviously an awful statistic. I dunno what it is like in punbb tbh, it may not even exist by default.

ozar · 2007-02-19 20:35:06

dolby wrote:

i recently joined a forum where upon register u had the fill in a question eg. "are you human?" as a nessecary field in order to prevent spambots from registering to the forum. i was wondering if that could happen here. i am not active in that many forums but this is the only one which seems to have so many problems of this kind

Yeah, I know for a fact that mod works extremely well, and I suggested that it be added to the site a few months back when we were still using phpBB but it didn't get implemented, so I don't know if it will be added under punBB, or not.

Either way, it's a great mod and it took the spammer count down from between 20 and 40 a day, down to absolute zero on another site that I frequent.

oz

carandraug · 2008-05-17 18:22:00

I just registered at the forum and though the question is probably a very good way to prevent spam, maybe it would be a good idea to increase the possible answers. I could only register on the third time because I tried the answers "Arch" and "Arch Linux" before "Archlinux".

Also, after failing the register, if I went back to the previous page to change the answer it wouldn't allow me to register. I had to refresh the page and refill the form before clicking register (maybe it's my browser, I don't know. I'm using "Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5").

phrakture · 2008-05-18 21:30:29

Firefox 3 doesn't actually re-pull the page when you hit back. It uses a cached version, which usually breaks captcha type things. On forms I make sure to refresh after hitting back.

LTSmash · 2008-05-21 00:02:12

bangkok_manouel wrote:

and spambots always post in the off-topic section... that is very polite.

xDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
LMAO

Well have you tried any "working" solutions?

Arch Linux

#1 2007-02-19 08:22:22

Spambots at the forum

#2 2007-02-19 17:43:22

Re: Spambots at the forum

#3 2007-02-19 17:52:03

Re: Spambots at the forum

#4 2007-02-19 19:28:13

Re: Spambots at the forum

#5 2007-02-19 20:35:06

Re: Spambots at the forum

#6 2008-05-17 18:22:00

Re: Spambots at the forum

#7 2008-05-18 21:30:29

Re: Spambots at the forum

#8 2008-05-21 00:02:12

Re: Spambots at the forum

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