Well of Souls Forums

What the heck? Does this site just attract bots or something? Why are there so many of these intrusions... and from some of the most EGREGIOUS hate mongering crap!

Can we do anything to stop this mess?

I play many PbP games and none of those forums EVER have the number of Bot intrusions of this site!

What gives?

I blame the space elves.

We get about 1-3 spam posts a day pretty regularly... they usually get deleted within a few hours of posting. I'm not sure what you mean about hate mongering though... the posts I see tend to be commerical spam. Though it's true I don't spend much time reading them; as soon as it's clear it's a spam message I just delete and ban.

We do seem to get a lot for a relatively small forum. The fact that the forum is based on the popular phpBB system may have something to do with it. Well-of-souls.com is a pretty well-trafficked site, so that may have something to do with it as well.

The forum registration requires email verification as well as a CAPTCHA test. The email verification seems to stop about 10 registrations per day, but these seem to get past the CAPTCHA without much trouble... either the CAPTCHA test is easy to defeat, or the registrations are being done manually. I am experimenting with different CAPTCHA settings to see if I can increase the effectiveness of the test against bots... but if they have real people doing the registrations, there's very little I can do to stop them. I ban email domains and IP's when I see the same ones being used multiple times, but of course most spammers use gmail or yahoo accounts.

The last option would be to require an administrator to validate each registration, but I'd like to avoid that if I can. The whole reason I had to move the forums here from Digital Webbing was that the administrators could not keep up with this task and had just stopped validating people.

I realize that the spam posts are annoying, but there are just a few per day, and they don't stay around long. It's not like there are pages and pages of them.

Yeah, I see your points. It just seems odd so many find their way here... though that may have something to do with ... as you put it the 'popularity ' of this current forum server.

You didn't likely see the last bot post it was ugly hate mongering against Israel. I'm not Jewish or German but I found it particularly offensive. But you got rid of it real quick. Thanks for your continued efforts Arioch!

Arioch wrote:I'm not sure what you mean about hate mongering though...

There was just a bunch of anti-israel spam posts.

PHPBB is free forum software, so a lot of people use it. But this in turn makes it a prime target for spammers and eventually virus seeders. I took my own forums down because of it, and they were admin authorisation only membership. But creative spammers still find a way in after time. All you can do is try and keep a reign on it where you can and keep regular backups incase the worst should ever occur. The only other alternative is different forum software.

Arioch wrote:either the CAPTCHA test is easy to defeat, or the registrations are being done manually. I am experimenting with different CAPTCHA settings to see if I can increase the effectiveness of the test against bots... but if they have real people doing the registrations, there's very little I can do to stop them.

Is there bossible to use images of loroi for recognition test?

could be interresting. would make sure the people joining are actually fan of the "show"

bunnyboy wrote:

Arioch wrote:either the CAPTCHA test is easy to defeat, or the registrations are being done manually. I am experimenting with different CAPTCHA settings to see if I can increase the effectiveness of the test against bots... but if they have real people doing the registrations, there's very little I can do to stop them.

Is there bossible to use images of loroi for recognition test?

I like that idea.

Sprawl63 wrote:

bunnyboy wrote:

Arioch wrote:either the CAPTCHA test is easy to defeat, or the registrations are being done manually. I am experimenting with different CAPTCHA settings to see if I can increase the effectiveness of the test against bots... but if they have real people doing the registrations, there's very little I can do to stop them.

Is there bossible to use images of loroi for recognition test?

I like that idea.

Me too.™