Anti Bot users Idea

zikitrake · Post by **zikitrake** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 11:34 pm

The forum.. can be programmed so it erase the message of a user when exists a link to a web and it's the first post of that user?

90%-99% of this bot user post a link in his first post

(if it's a silly idea, be free to criticizing it)

Bye!

CadeX · Post by **CadeX** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 2:41 am

Smart idea.

However i'm not the one to decide aye or nay.

Dreglor · Post by **Dreglor** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 5:02 am

thats one way but, most forums require when you are registering a validation number (with the garbled generated image and all) to protect from spam bots from registering and posting with out much restriction

Joakim Christiansen · Sat Feb 17, 2007 10:57 am

Dreglor wrote:thats one way but, most forums require when you are registering a validation number (with the garbled generated image and all) to protect from spam bots from registering and posting with out much restriction

I think we have that, but anyway, it doesn't help at all!
I have forum myself with that protection but the only one who register there is the bots!

Tipperton · Post by **Tipperton** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 3:34 pm

The forum I admister also had that problem even with captcha enabled, so I thought about it a while and came up with a theory of how they were able to get past the captcha test and a simple solution.

My theory was that the bots have copies of the graphics that all the popular forum software uses to create the captcha graphic, rather than attempt OCR on the image, they use the copies they have to figure out what the characters are by comparing the image contents.

This works because most people don't bother to replace the stock captcha images that come with the forum software.

My solution was to create my own set of images of the characters and replace the stock images with them. It seems to work, because the bots are no longer getting through the captcha test.

ricardo · Post by **ricardo** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 4:08 pm

Check the Winamp forums.

New user can't post a url and CAN'T even see urls.

You stay in that state until you rich X number of posts.

I feel that they stop SPAM doing that smart movement.

If visitors dont see urls, bots dont see any interest on posting there.

Tipperton · Post by **Tipperton** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 4:19 pm

ricardo wrote:New user can't post a url and CAN'T even see urls.

Wow! That's a great idea! I'll have to see if the forum software we use can do that...

Thanks for the tip!