Bots

[Swap Frog]

Bots have been a constant issue on the forums and banning them after they advertise is just too difficult. I would like a thing installed with the blurry writing where you have to copy it to prevent them from joining.

[Taven]

1. Banning them after they advertise is not difficult at all. I am not sure how you can make statements like that without knowing how the banning process works. We click like 2 or 3 things and the bot is no more.

2. Captcha is what you are talking about.

[Sayokyoku]

You mean Captcha? I think we had it installed a while ago, but Crad had to remove it for some reason. Probably to do with stabilising the server.

Either way, bots are not going away regardless of what we install.

[White Ranger]

Also, bots are everywhere on each forums. It's not difficult to get rid of bots and bots post/threads.

[Crad]

We disabled the previous method after it was revealed that several (at least 2) members were being treated as false positives and were being blocked from the site. This method would check against an external (off-site) blacklist of IP addresses, email addresses, and usernames and filter registrations based on these. Since then I've been trying to tune it, but it's a trial and error process of "oh crap I just made the board unavailable" to "completely ineffective".

As for the Re-Captcha, not sure when that was removed: I haven't touched it, but I did temporarily disable email authentication when it became apparent that our mailer daemon was broken (it's being forwarded properly now). That shouldn't have affected Re-Captcha.

Re-Captcha itself is a mixed bag of "somewhat-effective" to "completely ineffective" depending on the implementation. In general, fixed-width, mostly horizontal (even wavey), similarly-sized text is a cinch for most bots to crack. Google does a fairly decent Captcha implementation by having the text flow into each other with different widths, spaced non-linearly, but to my knowledge, even that has a ~30% crack rate for the more sophisticated algorithms. Even then, some bots actually operate with a human element, employing people to sit in front of a computer and read in Captchas from multiple sources. So, once again, it's going to be a mixed bag.

[KING OF NIGERIA]

Captchas have been proven to be useless several times. I find that a 'complete this sentence', 'which of these things are _____ or are a ____', or 'don't check this box' test works better than captchas.

[Pawn]

1. Banning them after they advertise is not difficult at all. I am not sure how you can make statements like that without knowing how the banning process works. We click like 2 or 3 things and the bot is no more.

2. Captcha is what you are talking about.

What Tavern said. It took me 1 minute max to ban a bot. I used to be all over that when I was a mod.

[Swap Frog]

i just feel like there is too many bots and some sites have that "what is 1+1?" etc that seems effective. I haven't ever seen a bot before here.

[Franken Stein]

i just feel like there is too many bots and some sites have that "what is 1+1?" etc that seems effective. I haven't ever seen a bot before here.

A good majority of time we either a) catch it before anyone else does, or b) respond immediately to the report.

A few of us remember the Botpocalypse.