Spam bots

[Minks]

Hi, there.
What's with the spam bot attacks here lately? Did some forum configuration get changed or did they just get smarter?
Best,
Minks

[neko kyouran]

talad recently upgraded the captcha verification, and we're looking at doing some others things as well.

just report them and we'll clean them up.

[Minks]

okay.
Good thing I'm already registerd, I suck at reading captchas 

[Sarva]

Don't worry Minks I hear you can hire someone to read them for you.

[Earowo]

what about blind computer ners, do you have a computer brail version of those?

[LigH]

talad recently upgraded the captcha verification...

Are you certain this was an "upgrade"?

Hardly saw so many since then...

[ohforf]

I did some Research in Captcha solving by OCR... the Captcha in this Forum is very weak.
Of course, one could hire cheap Labour to solve the (quite good) Recaptcha... but the usual Rate of 2$/1000 is too much for Spammers.

[LigH]

And once again, 3 more.

The most annoying part of reporting spammers is that I always need to waste 30 seconds before I am allowed to report the next one. And Opera seems to be half-supported by SMF only, it always gets the submit buttons (both Post and Preview) disabled when it returns to my reply after that 30-seconds warning. So I always have to copy my reply, reload the page, and paste it back to send it again.

[Talad]

The forum has three settings: low, medium, high. The forum was on medium when the attacks started. I've change it to high about 2 days ago, but seems the attacks even increased!! So I've put it back on medium, and I'm looking at some additional modules to add a different captcha check. Unfortunately SMF is very popular and spam bots break it easily.

About reporting the spammers, just report one for each user. We delete all posts of the offending user in one shot.

[Earowo]

@LigH dont worry, i do my share of reporting the spammers.
@Talad, I noticed that you added, the thing where you look at the picture of a word, and you type it to make an account, is it the same for the forum now? if so, how are they getting by?

[weltall]

because they can be read from computers

[LigH]

There are many different styles of "Captchas" = elements which shall be hard to recognise for a computer, but possible to recognise for a human. But some seem to be either not as hard as one believes, or the registration is indeed done by humans. Or there are known board software flaws a hacker can use to circumvent the captcha.

Whatever it is, it appears to be quite easy at the moment. There may be more features to avoid spammers (e.g. IP area blacklists, moderator managed registration), but they may either have side effects or require more efforts from the staff (maybe more staff even).

[weltall]

according to the ip to avoid them we would have to ban 3/4 cities in china (among them Singapore which seems the only outstanding of them)

[BoevenF]

There's a way to file a report about a spambot before the first post? because there are fake users who don't post anything yet.
this one, for example, is the last forum member when I'm writing that:

user: ege42dtdg
floretta.kyles4ts@hotmail.com

sorry Floretta, but we'll kill you  

Edit:
just found what CAPTCHA means, now I can work hard with a smile on my face 
CAPTCHA is a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart

[LigH]

Incredible how much spam comes from China, although China is known to use such a strong internet censorship?!

Well, no bias against nations. Being criminal is an individual attribute.