[Request] Stop Spambot Invasion

[Deleted User]

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AendaeronBluescale

Forum Spam is not easily stoppable.
Blackhats use these to manipulate search engines by Spamdexing.

Spam emails are cheap. They cost about 7 US-¢ per 1 million mails. Even for a small success rate, it stays lucrative to the one advertized.
About the same counts for forum spam.

Captchas are broken by two methods:
One: OCR submodules, they even get around distortion sometimes.
Two: Paid workers who return the solution of captchas. There are blackhat companies that provide such services.

Bots can be reprogrammed to account for checkboxes etc. and can get around these easily as well.

Wargaming rooted the problem of Spam in their forum in a twisted way: You need to complete 20 battles in World of Tanks or World of Warplanes to be eligible to post in their forums.
However, requiring to play at least a hour of BG:EE or BG2:EE is not a feasible requirement, because these games are not free to play.

The only solution which will stop the bot's droplets is reporting it as spam. It will be automatically hidden (queued for moderation) if 5 people mark it as spam.

I mark these spambots with the youtube link to help moderators find them by it's unique link. It also features as a warning (Monty Python - Spam) to others to notify that this link is in fact spam and any content the bot solitices is either scam, leads to computer viruses or is illegal.

[Deleted User]

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Troodon80

Shandyr said:

(like Obsidian Forum, or the Social Bioware Network Forums)

I cannot vouch for the Obsidian forum. On the BioWare Social Network, for example, Mass Effect subforums generally require that the poster owns one of their games (which was a pain in the arse for me due to not buying Mass Effect 3 through Origin, and so I had to wait for my physical copy before I was able to post).

There is one problem with that in this case, however, and that is the fact that a number of people here who would like to support the game post-release (as opposed to pre-ordering) won't be eligible to post on the forum until that purchase. That is also discounting people who own a copy for the iPad from iTunes. That is not generally considered consumer-friendly.

Other forums make use of IP blacklist detection such as Spamhaus. Even such detection is not 100% reliable due to how network infrastructure works. So where one IP address has been blacklisted, once the lease expires someone else will likely get it. Then you get something like this.

In reality, there is no perfect way to stop spam in a public forum such as this.

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ajwz

Stop spambots in just 4 easy steps! Webmasters hate us! These tips really work! Girls will go wild when they see the integrity of your forum software!

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