As some of you may have noticed spam posts are getting increasingly common - each morning I typically delete a number of spam posts - I'm sure the other Mods and Admins do the same too. This morning for instance I spent several minutes playing catch-up with one spam poster that was posting new crap as quickly as I could remove it.
I'd like to say a big thankyou to everyone that takes the time to report spam posts. Your posts help to identify the crap. Your reports help reduce uncertainty when removing posts; some spam is very obvious other stuff is pretty subtly. So cheers; you help make the forums a cleaner and greener place to visit and make it easier for Mods and Admins to do our job.
I try to spend 24 hours a day on the forums, but due to real life getting in the way I can't ;) So your help is very much appreciated. keep up the good work.
:booze:
Yes, I also want to thank you all for deleting the crap and providing bans. I try to be 24/7 on this forum, too, but there's these bug reports you always mention... XD
Cheers Gernot. Now get back to work on fixing those bugs! :P
Seriously, it's all because of your hard work Gernot that any of us are here, and want to stay =D
I also installed http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2182 (http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2182) this now. I hope it might help a bit. I heard about spammers form poor countries, where they place real people solving captchas for (no) money.
Quote from: Ian Price on 2011-Mar-24
Cheers Gernot. Now get back to work on fixing those bugs! :P
And start with the Wii port!
:whip:
QuoteI'd like to say a big thankyou to everyone that takes the time to report spam post
No problem!
Thank you mods for making this a clean and enjoyable environment. In fact, come to think of it I have not seen one shred of spam which is freaking awesome.
There was a bit around 2am yesterday - I was busy reporting some to the moderators, as I had nothing else to do :)
Oh.
There's been a couple of days over the last week or so where I've seen a metric ton of spam on the forums, and all I did was say "Bloody spam - I'm sure the moderators will get right onto that as soon as they wake up". Only because of this thread did I notice the "Report To Moderator" link.
Oops. Sorry about that. Will do better. :)
Quote from: MrTAToad on 2011-Mar-24
There was a bit around 2am yesterday - I was busy reporting some to the moderators, as I had nothing else to do :)
I was around then too - but I was at work. Why weren't you asleep?
Mainly because I was busy watching some Zero Punctuation videos :)
Thank you and the other mods Ian, it's a pain in the ass job... Nothing worse than settling down to poke about the forum and spending the first 20 minutes, deleting bot crap. Keep up the good work! :good:
Having modded a lot of forums myself in the past, the best anti spam method I found was not captcha or any other complex plug in but a simple random logic question. Bots do not know how to handle them, when they try to auto-register.
For example...
"What us the first name of the developer of GLBasic?"
Answer
"Gernot"
Simple, it can't be coded, it's 99% effective and nit intrusive fir new users.
Simple random maths works well too...
"3*11=" ?
This can be coded around but it filters out 75% of bots all the same.
Cheers,
Ian
logic question is hard for multilanguage support.
Perhaps mathematical ones would work ?
I really hate Captchas, they are even worse when they have shite graphics - they are usually very hard to distinguish - is that an "O" (oh) or a "0" (zero). And is that "I" (eye) or "l" (ell)?
A simple maths function could be good, however most of the spam I've seen lately appears to be human generated - (albeit cut&paste crap) they even add avatars and signatures. Nothing you do will stop them from registering.
Banning the ip range can take care for most dynamic ip's from a certain ISP, look up Whois for the spammers ISP range... This can get time consuming though.
Requiring an introduction post before posting is allowed, can add further complications to bots too.
Excuse me if I'm showing you to how to suck eggs here BTW.
Talking of which, I think you'd be surprised at the percentage of bots compared to humans Ian, there good at appearing human, once there in the system.
Cheers,
Ian
I have such questions in. Like:
"3 plûs 5 = "
I used special umlaut characters, that are human readable.
QuoteTalking of which, I think you'd be surprised at the percentage of bots compared to humans Ian, there good at appearing human, once there in the system.
I know the ratio of bots to humans is very high, but it's usually possible to tell the difference. And it depends on what they are pushing too. There will always be trolls and destructive funsters. You can't get rid of them completely, but you can make it harder for them to bother us.
Re:
QuoteRequiring an introduction post before posting is allowed, can add further complications to bots too.
Or could all first time posts be flagged for review / verification prior to being cleared for the forums?
Down side is that new users may miss out in a discussion in a timely manner.
Instead of a math CAPTCHA you could ask 'Type every RED character' and randomly choose a color each time so it's not RED every time, and have random character with random colors in the CAPTCHA image. If that's easier.
Are spammers cracking the CAPTCHA image to OCR the characters inside?
One method I was thinking about to prevent (or reduce) OCRing CAPTCHA data is that instead of solid (or gradient) colors (for the background AND letters) you use more of a 'noise' effect. Each pixel is randomly calculated to be in a range of values (grey scale). Background and characters can have the same range but have the background weighted to use the dark end and the characters weighted to use the brighter end of the scale.
It will look like random pixels of various shades, but where the characters are you'll notice it tend to be brighter on average than the background, but each individual pixel doesn't give away it's true identity (background or character). Can't really predict how effective this would be but my hunch says humans should be able to tell the difference easily, and good luck writing code to OCR the image!
[Edit]
Well, maybe my idea isn't that great.
I tried it in a paint program and the ranges have to be quite different to see the characters, but more experimenting would be needed! Still, try OCRing this image! You'd have to have logic to track clumping of data, as a white pixel could still mean either background or character.
[attachment deleted by admin]
a email controlled forumaccount would help ..
That's the last resort.
The trouble with the RED and non-OCR characters is that people with visual impairments can't read/see them clearly. You shouldn't exclude real people just because they can't read the CAPTCHA.
You usually have an audio representation with noise added
Quote from: MrTAToad on 2011-Mar-24
You usually have an audio representation with noise added
I was speaking specifically about the two examples above, and using captcha as a generic term.
Ah right :)
I thought, "What about moderator approval of new accounts" but that wouldn't stop anti-spam taking up time because mods would still need to trawl through the account requests. Might take less time to do that though?
As said, Admin approval will be a last resort.