The bot build up is strange...

[Illysia]

If you look at the Member List when sorted by date registered, you'll see all the recent people joining. Now some of the recent joins are of course legitimate, but some can be easily picked out as bots because they either follow naming schemes of confirmed bots, or their profile information contains website urls that appear to be ads, pornography links, or strangely configured addresses.

Usually, the bots are just a minor nuisance, but I am a little concerned about the sheer number of them that join every day. One or two? OK fine. But 2016-10-15 saw at least 20 join... More bots are joining this forum everyday than people. I'm not sure what can be done about the bots, but I really think they need to be cleaned up if possible, especially since every so often one comes through in an attempt to inundate the forum.

[Venalan]

It's becuase the forums look active now, so I blame you for it. (P.S. I'm keeping a check on the ones that post spam and removing them as they happen)

[Illysia]

Oops

Thanks for clean up job. I try to report the spam as I see it. I find "Show unread posts since last visit." is helpful for wading through the sea of posts to only report one spam post per thread. I figure reporting each individual post isn't important.

[lilura]

so I blame you for it.

yeah way to go illy 

 

[Illysia]

If I send the bots to go boo you Lilu, they may leave the forum alone for a while. :p

[Venalan]

IRC could do with more people on it to keep Lilura company, could you send them there Illysia?

[Illysia]

Can #planeshift hold them all?

[Emaline]

Yeah what's going on this month? If you look at the server stats more people have registered a new account this month alone that any ONE year combined dating back to 2011...almost 2x as many...and this month is only 1/2 over! Almost 1,000 people have made a new account this month? Are these stats right?

Or maybe I'm reading them wrong?

http://207.244.96.64/PlaneShift/smf/index.php?action=stats

If you scroll down to forum history and expand 2016 you'll see what I mean.

[Illysia]

I think you are right Emaline.

[Venalan]

Let's add updating the anti-bot check on the creation page to the list of things talad needs to get to doing.

[Illysia]

I need to make a thread named "*poke* *poke* Hey Talad..." and stick everything in it.

[Dilihin]

Or contribute to PS and do it yourself? 

[Illysia]

Ha! Talad would never give me access to the website whether I could fix or not. :p

[Venalan]

I got fedup with all the cleaning up I was doing so we now have new account creation questions so that should, for a while at least, stop so many bots appearing.

[MishkaL1138]

If I were appointed global mod of this forum, and let me tell you, I'd be a GREAT moderator, I'd fix this bot problem with a very simple solution. It'd be so simple, you'd be amazed by it. Because I'm great at coming up with simple solutions to problems like this.

We're going to build a hyooge firewall. A very large one, one so thick no bots will be able to pass through it. And guess what. Guess what. We're going to make the hackers pay for it. Mark my words. We're going to build a hyooge, the greatest firewall, and make the hackers pay for it. And you're going to see it.