A Few Possible Solutions to the Spambot Problem

Duke_

The not-so-great art doggo
Lately, I have been noticing that we have been getting far too many spambots on the forums. They are really starting to get on everyone's nerves because they are VERY annoying. I did some research, and found two possible solutions to stop the problem (taken from Wikipedia)
One way to prevent spambots from creating automated posts is to require the poster to confirm their intention to post via e-mail. Since most spambot scripts use a fake e-mail address when posting, any email confirmation request is unlikely to be successfully routed to them. Some spambots will pass this step by providing a valid email address and use it for validation, mostly via webmail services.
Using methods such as security questions are also proven to be effective in curbing posts generated by spambots, as they are usually unable to answer it upon registering.
Hopefully one of these will be able to stop the annoying problem of spambots. And while I do agree that they make nice tasty meals, they are still very excessive and need to be stopped.
 
Hmm, spambots have taken to the shoutbox, impressive. I wondered how long it would take the fellow to finally take a hint that his accounts were getting banned on a constant basis before any viewiers could click his phoney links.

In any case, this will actually make banning spambots easier for the Moderators. When they actually become active, we can just banhammer them back to cyberspace faster.

Start screenshooting the shoutbox, everyone, it's a new war, a war that travels faster than the speed of sound.
 
Only one way to ensure that there is no more spambots on this forum...
CAPTCHAS!
captcha-2.png

These weird things ^

If not, then SECURITY QUESTIONS!
Or if that fails, A SIMPLE MATH QUESTION! Like 14 + 27(everytime you make a post on a thread, or comment on the shoutbox).
 
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VashX updated the forum with Google's recaptcha. Unfortunately we actually garnered even MORE spambots shortly after we upgraded the CAPTCHA system.

Basically, we're at a standstill. I keep recommending the Bad Behavior spambot shield, but it still hasn't happened yet.
 
I'm not sure if this has been suggested but cant you just ban all accounts using the same IP and/or email address from creating a new account? Also, I've noticed that the names are quite similar in that there are usually two words and neither of them are in the English vocabulary, though I'm not sure if you can screen that.
 
I'm not sure if this has been suggested but cant you just ban all accounts using the same IP and/or email address from creating a new account? Also, I've noticed that the names are quite similar in that there are usually two words and neither of them are in the English vocabulary, though I'm not sure if you can screen that.
That's the issue with spambots. They always have different IPs. I have no doubt the aforementioned spammer is probably taking IPs from various parts of the world and bouncing them off towers so they wind up in the Middle East.

Also, it's not possible to register an account with the same email.

Even so, we generally can pick out the spambot names due to their inability to be creative with their namesakes, and the fact they often have a homepage URL linked to some spam site. :tongueout:
 
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