Flame Warriors ~ View topic

The spambots are almost defeated. Twisted Evil

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I'm Sisi's entertainment.

Sexcellent. Party time.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
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Well the thing is, though I'm not deleting many pages of spam a day, I have to look over the page or two for actual new members but the bots make it easy with their garbled names

Obviously a lot of bots are still signing up to spam the memberlist with a website.

It is I think glaringly obvious a forum needs at least one person around on a regular basis with admin permissions to keep the obvious spammer email domains beaten down.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

I've been studying bots lately. Like, a lot. If I were an admin I might be able to use some... unconventional weapons, let's say, to great effect in the war on bots.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
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But the thing is, for bots :-

an upgrade to phpbb3
captcha stops the dumb ones
Modifying the registration question to reflect knowledge specific to flame warriors.
usergroup to post √
Search bots like google bot, no permission to view membership list.

Some admins remove the membership list from guest viewing, but I feel that sucks because people do forget exactly what username they use from time to time.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Bots are getting to be perfectly fit for infiltrating V3 these days. There are types of bots that can't manage to figure out any kind of board software, even notoriously bot-attracting types like MyBB and the good ol' guestbook.

The dumber/older ones are brought to an instant halt by a good CAPTCHA, yes, but the smarter ones tend to spam a lot more effectively as well, so by eliminating the large quantity of clunkier ones you're actually probably only getting rid of a rather small portion of the problem. Smaller than you'd expect at least.

Needing to be grouped to post is always effective against bots, yeah, but unless you've got people who can approve any would-be new members in short order (I.e. an active staff, one checking for new members in the bot-infested wasteland at least daily.) it should be merely temporary if you ask me. People are all too impatient and easily frightened, which means your average new member probably wouldn't come back unless they were promptly grouped, especially if they saw bots swarming all over.

Making the member list, usergroups, etc. unviewable to search engines -- and even some spambots -- is just a matter of nofollow'ing some links and editing robots.txt, though I'm not sure if the hosting would allow for the latter. Search engines will definitely obey nofollow and robots.txt, some bots will obey robots.txt as well. Pretty much all bots obey the nofollow declaration in anchor tags, because in the eyes of bots "nofollow" = "this is an advertisement, you can't spam here." Making the registration link nofollow will also trip bots up, and generally you'll only get any bot registrations after that if someone's been naughty and linked directly to your registration page from somewhere infested with bots.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

Yes requiring groups with the group moderator required to add each member - isn't the best for impatient fly by night posters.

I'm sure in phpbb3, a user can add themselves if that option is available. I say that as I'm sure I've done this myself a couple of years ago, but perhaps that phpbb forum wasn't standard.

I'm also sure in phpbb3 the admin can modify the registration question. Hard for the average bot script to circumvent or answer correctly until the answer is supplied by a human.

Using robots.txt against bots and the registration link - Brilliant, honestly something I've not thought about.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Robots.txt doesn't work on most spambots, for rather obvious reasons. It works on some, (I.e. they willingly obey it even though they by no means have to.) but not many. Declaring nofollow in links blockades a LOT of 'em though because they're usually designed to take nofollow as "no point clicking, can't spam here."

As for a custom question to register, some bots could bruteforce a radio button question by selecting all the options in turn until one answer lets them through. A question that requires putting something manually in a text field would stop them dead in their tracks pretty much, because the dumb ones would just try to put what they'd put as a thread title most likely, and even the smartest ones would only be able to send an "I need help!" signal to their handler and/or try to bruteforce it just the same as a password.

I still know many many unconventional weapons that are phenomenally more powerful against the bots. Strictly classified stuff, real hush-hush as per requirements of "The Steel Pile Initiative."*

*I just made that up, but I'm totally calling it that from now on.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
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Radio buttons certainly don't work against code which counters for typical radio buttons which are easily navigated with text browsers. I in the past have struck a few which I found no real means but to drop back to a graphical interface.

I'm lost how bots could be used against bot masters. I know various scripting could be employed, like for one, simply checking the specific email provided against spam lists.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Using bots against their own masters, that wasn't what I meant, but that is quite an idea. Where there's a will there's a way. I might make something that does that in case I accidentally piss a bot master off and need to nuke their shit.

Interestingly, though not very relatedly: My dear old zealous enem--*ahum* Imean, pals at Vex Xiang and The Sonic Station appear to have experienced quite the population boom in unwelcome new members who love ugg boots, NFL jerseys, Louis Vuitton, (I don't even know what that is.) and much much more. There's also one particular charming, though insistent gentleman that posits "You are mistaken. Let's discuss it." on VX. Laughing

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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
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Yep, the same crowd of stupid bots have finally found their way over there. Most post from the same bunch of email domains, so it should be fairly easy to stuff em up through the email ban list.

Word filter ugg and vuton - pity instead of a filter -> word filter on titles = disallow.

Yeah that's one of the annoying things, it's obvious they try to copy ... I mean match various other topic titles. That's what made it so hard for me, there'd be at least a couple of realistic ones.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

I'm sure they'll live ... long enough for me to come marching in with a fancy new gadget or twelve, and curb-stomp them after the bots have doled out severe attrition effects. D'eheheh.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

Hmm some new tools. Let us know how they work out.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

TSS LOOKS clean, but they're just blocking a large portion of them and deleting everything that slips through the automated defenses ASAP. Their SEO has been pretty well destroyed, though, and just about everyone who has an antivirus toolbar, Web of Trust-like browser add-on, etc. etc. etc. gets a very grave-looking warning if they try to open the site.

VX has never ever EVER had a competent staff member, (I scared the entire flock of my day off starting from when I was twelve. And I wasn't very smart when I was twelve.) and ever since the now-absentee root admin, the Vex Xiang who shares his username with his site's name, moved the site over to a server he doesn't own -- deleting everything in the process, for AT LEAST the third time over -- I highly doubt they have the access to do such things. No database access generally means one is shit outta luck if one wants to edit robots.txt. EDIT: Unless one is on a very small host whose server admin is willing to field requests for such, but VX is hosted here.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
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It seems the bot flood has STARTED to slow down. 13 guests and 3 members right now. Or it might just be the time of day. It seems a lot of spam peaks in early morning (by the timezones here in the 'States), so I dunno.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
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I think there's a bit of programming behind a few different bot tactics.

If it's the same machines sending bots, when they started here with vuton and bags, they used to be much more active while I wasn't around.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Ah, I see.

Maybe I should hit "log me in automatically each visit" and set my browser to refresh the main page every 4 minutes 45 seconds.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

Well, by "around" I meant I was deleting their droppings - I was also bumping a handful of problematic bots from logging on.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

It seems spam bots are finally starting to give up.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Clueless Newb Joined: 09 Jan 2013 Posts: 11

Still raining spam at least it's not pouring.

Oh a mere handful every time I log on ... I think even in the "good" days we had more spam.

Anyhow, woot! only 1 new spam since yesterday listed, even if other members have cleaned up the crypt.

Finally even the dumb bots are getting it.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Clueless Newb Joined: 09 Jan 2013 Posts: 11

Hey this place is shaping up. For the lack of spam, I might be inspired to post more Razz

I am sure glad I don't have to delete a bunch of stuff each day.

Despite the new member forum being hidden, the stupid bots just keep on going and going.

Today was a bit different. In the last 24 hours, 2165 new threads up from the 500 to 800 I've spotted lately.

I've been busy, and have not yet written to Mike (as promised) to see if he's planning to upgrade sometime soon.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Wow, the bots are really fuggin' stupid. Even I didn't know bots could or would be this dumb, and I'm like, a trained professional when it comes to spambots. Without their spammy shit getting any hits from Google in the "new member" forum they're still chugging along, and they seem to have posted more spam posts than there are regular posts on the entire board, not to mention over twice as much as is currently in this forum. Even on VX their spam is still earning pagerank for something, though because it's all piled on top of itself and rather obviously spam to Google, probably not much. But this is just 100% wasted resources for the poor little zombie computers.

Oh well. Guess it doesn't hurt any of us any.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com

2010 new bot posts today - that won't be seen by anyone real.

I haven't any PM spam lately Very Happy

which is good. I guess the bots are busy PMing each other. I take a little satisfaction in that the PM bots can just go for it and real members won't be bothered all too much - there are more than 150000 bot accounts to be filled up with spam PMs
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Bit early to say that. I'm getting a lot of it.
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Sorry to hear. I wonder why some members seem to be copping PM spam ... or is it just me who's not getting that much of it.

Spam posts lately have been in the 2000 or so a day. All I can say, is at least it isn't polluting the main forums.
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The important thing is knowing who owns the fence

Maybe the bots just go down the user list in alphabetical order. And of course the unwitting human who owns the zombied PC will probably reboot eventually, at which point the bots probably just start over. They might not even get to the F's most of the time; or they might intentionally avoid groups that seem to look like staff on the given site, for obvious reasons.

I do wonder why they're sending PM spam, seeing as it quite clearly doesn't add to pagerank; but then again neither does the metric crapton of spam being pumped out every hour of every day in the "new member" section. Maybe FW just attracted an abundance of the less-than-intelligent bots. Or maybe some human element behind the bots is just that pissed at us.

After all, this site has pissed off a lot of people over the years; and although working a little spamagic is a bit complicated and counterintuitive, if you can just manage to blunder across the first few little secrets and tricks it becomes so easy the average Bawl Hall member can do it.

P.S. When did that site stop being changed to Bawl Hall? I liked that wordfilter, made me smile a little every time I saw it.
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Everything that has transpired in this thread has done so according to my design.
forwarding.station.trottam@gmail.com