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ridiculous amount of bots here... how to fix it.

miker00lz

New member
almost every user online at any given time here is a bot, you can tell because they usually have advertising in their sig and/or profile if you click on their name. there are always hundreds of guests online as well at all times and you can be sure that they are bots trying to register, but your captcha stops a large chunk of it.

i had this exact same problem on a forum that i run, captcha didn't really help in any way whatsoever. some bots can beat it now. the only way i found that i could stop them is to use a question and answer thing in the registration. ditch the captcha and try it. it DOES work! as soon as i switched to that, the bot registration stopped completely. there hasn't been one single bot or spam post since.

try it! it's ridiculous that 95% of your server's bandwidth is taken up by spam bots. this sh!t really needs to stop. i'd like to see them get cracked down on, but what can really be done? especially when they all come from china or russia.

i also recommend you have a look at the IP ranges most of them are coming from and filter them out at the web server configuration level with an .htaccess file. don't use the forum software options to do it, it will still suck a lot of resources from the server machine that way.
 
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smcd

Active member
We try to stay on top of them but they are many :p Options are always welcome, and can be discussed
 

Allnatural

New member
Moderator
the only way i found that i could stop them is to use a question and answer thing in the registration. ditch the captcha and try it. it DOES work! as soon as i switched to that, the bot registration stopped completely. there hasn't been one single bot or spam post since.
I thought Martin had implemented something like that?

Yes, the problem needs to be stopped at the front door, so to speak. No exaggeration, there are dozens of new bots registering each day. Many don't bother to post, but if google indexes profile pages (which I think it does) they don't need to. All their seo crap is right there in the member profiles.
 

azul

New member
I have forum for random stuff. It had easily 0 to 150 bot registration at month. I put captcha there and bot registration slowed down. Still few every month or two. So from out of my frustration I put a question there. Just a simple question which answer is not found from my site but is common knowledge for my "target users" (Finnish forum so question related to Finland) .. 10 months has passed and no bots has been seen.

At international forum it's quite hard to find a question that can answered by any human but not bots. Somewhere I have seen usage of simple math, "leave this one empty", "give name of the search engine which has tho o's", "ask solution at irc channel..", etc. Too complicated or demanding question might reduce all users registrations :)

If you can set several questions and ask 2-3 of them at a time (like out of 15 questions) .. bots are guaranteed to vanish. At least for a while :)
 

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