PureBasic Forums - English

Hi,
I'm seeing more and more spam posts here. Has it become worse or am I online at the wrong times?
Maybe we could prevent these bots from registering by giving them a tougher task like "When is Fred's brithday?" or "Write a simple emulator for 64Bit apps on 32Bit Windows. Don't exceed 500 lines or 400kB and don't use API!"?

whoever is in charge of this Forum
could set "newly Regsitered Users" to : "Read Only Access" ... until they OK'd or till 24 hours or so
giving enough time for Board Moderator to check IP number for a Spammer

https://www.projecthoneypot.org/search_ip.php

https://www.stopforumspam.com/search

thats what i've done in the past ,
it was a hassle sometimes , so i quit doing it that way ,
instead only Users who purchase my Software can join + Post in my Forum .
i Register them myself , email them a Password + instructions

i only have Total members 1446 , "real" Registered Users ... Fred has 6 times that many
maybe its too much work to do it my method ??.. easier just to eliminate Spammer as he Posts

They are now often not robots, but humans paid a few cents to do the job. Some are paid only to create the accounts (~20 cents per account), then the robots do the rest. No captcha or other technique can resist them.

The only effective way to block them is to make sure that every new user is in the "New user" group for a certain number of posts.

A new user will have their first posts blocked pending approval by a moderator. Once the number of approved posts is reached, he automatically switches to standard user mode. This is the default configuration of phpBB, but it has been installed for so long that it must have been modified since then.

Note that it is the number of approved articles that is important, not the number of posted articles (if you put 3 and he posts 4, the fourth one will not be automatically approved)

To set it:
ACP
- Board Configuration
- User registration settings
- New member post limit: (set up > 0 to activate manuel approbation system)
New members are within the Newly Registered Users group until they reach this number of posts. You can use this group to keep them from using the PM system or to review their posts. A value of 0 disables this feature.

And of course, moderators should not validate simple messages that only serve to increase the number of approved messages (such as "thank you for this article", etc)

PS. You should also think about deleting spare spammers: block all users who have never logged in after creating an account.

-- fr
Et pour le forum français qui est encore plus spammé
PCA
- Configuration générale
- Paramètre des enregistrements
- Limite de messages d’un nouveau membre (mettre un nombre > 0)

2023 has brought the spammers back

atack cleared for the first time

But NOT having steong CAPTCHA is NOT excuse of the rest.
We need CAPTCHA AND everything else extra after that.

Is stupid to leave it like this..

I've just spent last half hour deleting spam and banning

We will probably have more than 100 spam posts today at this rate sorry.

Simply increase the amount of mods. There should be enough active and trustable long term users. Some kind of "mod on probation" role and assign it to 5 additional people. This unfixed problem is getting really old in 2023.

A developer forum should have an awesome captcha system anyway.

yes we need some basic protection and we are covered from most time zones

Bitblazer wrote: Fri Jan 06, 2023 10:00 pm Simply increase the amount of mods. There should be enough active and trustable long term users. Some kind of "mod on probation" role and assign it to 5 additional people. This unfixed problem is getting really old in 2023.

A developer forum should have an awesome captcha system anyway.

This is a cure, not a prevention.

I'm not a web programmer myself, but... between us, hundreds of coders here, I think someone could do a simple captcha when registering new users (which is better than nothing).

Something simple like:

• Are you a living being? Yes | No

• Are you a program? Yes | No

• Are you an AI? Yes | No

• Do you need to eat to exist? Yes | No

• Do you need electricity to exist? Yes | No

I think it would prevent a good percentage of bots

Nothing a magnum .38 special wouldn't fix. Do you feel lucky punk, well do you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQkpes3 ... HateOnJord

idle wrote: Sat Jan 07, 2023 10:22 am Do you feel lucky punk, well do you.

Caronte3D wrote: Sat Jan 07, 2023 10:07 am I'm not a web programmer myself, but... between us, hundreds of coders here, I think someone could do a simple captcha when registering new users (which is better than nothing).

Doesn't the forum already have a captcha in the form of having you drag the answers to what's PB used for to the correct columns or something to that extent?
I remember having a very hard time passing that one because of the accessibility barrier it represents.
My solution to the captcha being effective and accessible has been to have a bank of randomly picked question/answer pairs related to the website/product itself, not as obscure to make it hard for newbies, but something that you'd only know if you've actually at least read pb docs or something. As an optional second layer, I'd have a passcode-like step where you set the value of given combo boxes to the numbers shown, e.g., 4 9 5 3, particularlly useful when the website is in another language so the combo boxes contain the numbers written as a word in that language.
Mainstream-wise, I see recaptcha everywhere, and it's perfectly useable, I either get no prompt, or get the checkbox which often fails, but then I get the audio captcha.
Maybe something like needing to verify your account by visiting a link sent via email, or if necessary having mods approve new users explicitly could work, too.