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Spam on the forums, please stop it.


omega79

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Maybe restrict posting URLs to people who have at least 4 Posts.

then there is this project to block some robots even b4 they register

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/httpbl.php

and this

http://www.stopforumspam.com/

when i was the owner of a vbb board there was a plugin where it allowed me

to upload custom pictures with custom questions/answers ...

if you do not ask questions like "how many", "what color" or "yes or no" it will

block a lot of bots ... if something like that is available for phpbb

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there could be pictures of renegadex units and buildings ...

"what do you see on the picture?"

but that might be too much of an insider question for newbies

You could put 2 answers there. If you see a picture of a GDI Soldier, the question could be like:

"What do you see in the picture?"

a) GDI Soldier

b) Nod Flame-Tank

Then the answer would be quite simple and understandably.

Greetings, Koni

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But without the spam, we wouldn't get memorable quotes such as this:

"You are able to the choice is yours inside a roaster inside your the oven or for people that really want a great roast."

-a3nb3wc5l, 23 Apr 2014

So inspirational... If the sentence made any sense to me, lol.

But yeah, i've seen a few bots here since i registered here. I usually report them and just ignore them afterwards, no reason to publicise it by putting it at the front of the forum. I don't want any innocent readers to accidentaly press the link on their posts, leading to having unknowingly getting all kinds of malware downloaded on their PC.

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If you have your own pictures and ask questions that need a different answer than yes/no, numbers or colors ...

something like that:

lJNCE0ul.jpg

Possible Questions and answers:

Q: What is the cat doing?

A: sleeping / relaxing

Q: What animal is on the picture?

A: cat

Q: What Instrument is the cat sleeping on?

A: Guitar

Q: What material is the guitar made of?

A: wood

So if you have like 5 Pictures and 4-5 Questions to each you have 20-25 combinations ...

I did use a system like that when i did run a vbb4 board ... after activation of this we never had any spam anymore ...

any new registered user gets only 1 question ofcourse, and an other one if the answer is incorrect

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A Q&A system can be very effective as an anti-bot mechanism. The best questions will generally have a unique question/answer to the website.

Example for a gaming community (and what I used): "Name a game we host a server for." - and this would accept many answers.

Example for Renegade-X: "Name the game developed here." - which could accept RenX / RenegadeX / Renegade-X (though this one would probably be the most answered by bots) / Ren-X

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A Q&A system can be very effective as an anti-bot mechanism. The best questions will generally have a unique question/answer to the website.

Example for a gaming community (and what I used): "Name a game we host a server for." - and this would accept many answers.

Example for Renegade-X: "Name the game developed here." - which could accept RenX / RenegadeX / Renegade-X (though this one would probably be the most answered by bots) / Ren-X

Sorry about the bots guys, we are in progress of fixing the situation. Although no system is perfect but you can set up the system to require human input to complete. The picture one is great, but takes some time to set up on an old system like this.

We're back to using a Q&A system like before but using a question that can't be answered by any known bots. Bots now-a-day can use things like google to look up the question and post the answer based on the first few outputs or use something like clever bot that can answer some weird questions like "What's the largest river in South America". So the current questions is along the lines of "What is the first two letters and the second to last letter of Omega?" and of the course, the answer would be OMG (not caps sensative or space sensative so O M G would be acceptable)

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the benefit of the picture thing is that it can not be googled ...

specially if you use pictures you took yourself ;)

I remember that I lined up certain fruits or objects in a picture and asked something like "name the object on the right" or "name the fruit left of the bottle"

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1 click ... more easy than reporting them

1 click delete button for moderators, but they aren't online 100% of the time 24/7.

Perhaps as an immergency method, get a voting system up for posts like upvoting and downvoting. That way, forum users could downvote the spam when they encounter them and mods can spot those downvoted posts in a list. After which they remove it instead of scouring the entire forum continuously whenever there is a new post.

On the bright side, upvoting/downvoting also reduces the amount of rubbish people say on these forums as an act of filtering out the good tips and bad tips for the Devs.

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i would volunteer as a spamguard ...

only delete spamposts ... no demand on any internals

Ditto. If you gave me power to delete posts, you can obviously track it, and give me the boot the first slip up. I would literally only delete spam posts, I wouldn't even delete haenous vulgur or otherwise explicative user posts as those are fewer and can sit with a report for a real moderator to delete.

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A recent forum I've been on had a spam guard that worked perfectly!

As it is a Dutch forum, the forum asks a question about a shadow of an animal. If entered correctly, the post made it to the forum. This feature was also on every reply you make on a topic, not just making an account or registering.

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Well, if thats the case, than thats also some sort of "bullsh%t" filter not worth the time posting unless you realy think it's worth the time.

I'm not talking about colour, just the name of an animal portrayed in a shadow as a question

It'd be just as effective and less annoying to have it registration-only, as opposed to per-post. I already get irritated when websites require a question during the login process.

I just wouldn't post if I had to fill something in every time -- it's not that it's difficult, it's just a repetitive task that gets very old, very fast. At that point I'd just shove any/all opinions into the IRC channel(s), which I used to do to a degree anyways until the DevBot disappeared.

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