The version of vBulletin currently installed does not support any more spambot prevention than is already in place. Currently I believe CAPTCHA is the main line of defense. One of two things are happening:
1) A human is registering the bot (in which case no line of defense will ever keep them out)
2) The bots are somehow circumventing CAPTCHA (in which case they have circumvented all defenses available to us at the moment)
It is entirely possible that an update to the vBulletin software will yield more powerful security measures, but I do not own our vBulletin license and have no means to run the updates. That would be up to Stef.
I probably could restrict all new users to make a post in the introductory thread before being allowed to post elsewhere, but I've always feared that making the forum so restrictive at the onset would turn away potential new users. It's bad enough we have a tiered system preventing thread creation until making a certain number of reply posts (also put in place to counter spambot efforts). That said, registration has been somewhat slow these days anyway, so I suppose such a measure might not be the hindrance I assume it to be.
I'll open it up to the people: would you consider a restriction to the intro thread an okay measure to combat spammery?
If one post is required in that thread before any others, the spambots might not figure it out immediatly, so there are pretty high odds the spambots don't figure it out until it is banned. Additionally, this would also help to serve the purpose of the intro thread, as new users have to introduce themselves, a sort of entrance foyer into the forums.
It is a restrictive idea. I mean, whenever new people join any forum, it's usually just a widely known courtesy to post in their intro thread before all else, not a mandatory requirement. However, it doesn't seem like a bad idea at all for restricting spambots.
How practical would it be for the system to simply not allow new users to post messages with links in them until they have a few legitimate posts under their accounts? I don't think I've ever seen a spambot post here without a link of some sort.
With this new invasion of spambots I suggest that the "title" below newly registered users be changed from "I suck less than BunnyTu2006" to "I most assuredly suck more than BunnyTu2006", since, let's face it, at least BunnyTu2006 doesn't annoy us constantly.
It could be North Korea... but it's probably Chinese. Some of these spammers have been writing in Chinese pinyin, so there's a good chance I'm bringing them here somehow. Don't know though.
Don't worry, I got all John motherfuckin' Connor on their asses.
Edward Furlong John Connor, Nick Stahl John Connor, Thomas Dekker John Connor, Christian Bale John Connor or the actually competent one that we never actually saw on-screen except for a two-second non-speaking shot in T2?
Inquiring minds want to know!
(Damn there've been a lot of John Connors. They probably have a plan.)
I killed them as John Connor will one day kill Skynet's automatons. Clearly I wouldn't be referring to any actor that portrayed John Connor in his pre-Terminator-killing youthful days where he ran like a little wuss.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know how spambots find forums? I don't know much about this kind of thing, but I would be willing to guess that the address www.theorangebelt.org/forums is on a spamming list, much like many e mails are.
What if we changed the forums address slightly? If we changed it from /forums to something inconspicuous, like /robots or /SCIENCE or /astley, would that help at all?
Spambots find forums the same way Google does: webcrawlers following links and keywords. The pretty much 100% surefire way to get rid of spambots is to disable webcrawler-indexing (by creating and editing a robots.txt file at the root level of the forum), but this would prevent our site from being Google-searchable. Probably not a very good tradeoff as it makes our site effectively invisible to the outside world.
But I agree, the recent spike in spambot traffic is a bit irritating.
Comments
1) A human is registering the bot (in which case no line of defense will ever keep them out)
2) The bots are somehow circumventing CAPTCHA (in which case they have circumvented all defenses available to us at the moment)
It is entirely possible that an update to the vBulletin software will yield more powerful security measures, but I do not own our vBulletin license and have no means to run the updates. That would be up to Stef.
I probably could restrict all new users to make a post in the introductory thread before being allowed to post elsewhere, but I've always feared that making the forum so restrictive at the onset would turn away potential new users. It's bad enough we have a tiered system preventing thread creation until making a certain number of reply posts (also put in place to counter spambot efforts). That said, registration has been somewhat slow these days anyway, so I suppose such a measure might not be the hindrance I assume it to be.
I'll open it up to the people: would you consider a restriction to the intro thread an okay measure to combat spammery?
Fiddling around with posting priveledges is lame.
It could be North Korea... but it's probably Chinese. Some of these spammers have been writing in Chinese pinyin, so there's a good chance I'm bringing them here somehow. Don't know though.
Inquiring minds want to know!
(Damn there've been a lot of John Connors. They probably have a plan.)
What if we changed the forums address slightly? If we changed it from /forums to something inconspicuous, like /robots or /SCIENCE or /astley, would that help at all?
But I agree, the recent spike in spambot traffic is a bit irritating.
Still, in all likelyhood the spambots don't respect the robots.txt file anyway, so it probably won't do much good.