mOdEtWo on 19/3/2005 at 12:03
What about adding a custom text field that new users have to fill in when they register? That would make the bot programmers have to re-configure it especially for TTLG.
:ebil:
Thelink on 19/3/2005 at 21:20
Quote Posted by David
The way it works is that a spam bot runs around filling in the registration forms for various websites, it then fires back the registration image to a preset IP. At this point a human fills in the a textbox with the letters in the image, submits the form which the bot adds to the registration form and tada, they're done.
Ebil little bastards. :eek:
Matthew on 22/3/2005 at 14:57
See, I didn't even click on the 2 currently in CommChat! Conditioning strikes again!
SlyFoxx on 22/3/2005 at 15:03
Oh looks like somebody's at it again. K-mart shopping spree anybody?
Scots Taffer on 22/3/2005 at 17:24
Quote Posted by henke
Spamspotting - the new craze sweeping the... um, this thread! :D
Yup, fascinating eh? Maybe we could start a spam counter.
OR MAYBE NOT. >:|
henke on 23/3/2005 at 17:53
OR MAYBE LOL! >:|
Isn't anyone gonna do something bout that "Feel Bored!!"-spam thread in CommChat soon? It's been there for hours now and already has like 3 replys FFS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
jer on 29/3/2005 at 07:53
Quote Posted by mOdEtWo
What about adding a custom text field that new users have to fill in when they register? That would make the bot programmers have to re-configure it especially for TTLG.
:ebil:
This is actually a really good way to combat the spam. I wrote some of the mass-signup software (configured specially for TTLG, for educational purposes of course) that reads in the registration page, parses it accordingly, and pulls the image as well, allowing a human to register an account every 5-10 seconds. It's a pretty slick operation.
The thing i've found to combat it is to buck the convention. I think it was MT that had huge problems with comment spam because everyone kept the comment script as comments.cgi or something similar, allowing bots to just find an MT site and spam the comments.cgi module repeatedly without actually having to parse anything in the page. Most spam programs (to my knowledge) don't parse the page fully, they rely a lot on default settings, and other things. Now, if vBulliten required uniqueness requirements for all vBulliten software leaving it's studio, the spammers would have to program a smarter software to analyze the page and get the required fields.
What I think would work the best is on the final registration page, have a hidden element, such as
Code:
<input type="hidden" value="lalala" name="f"/>
On the page that processes the form data, it checks to see if the <b>f</b> data is present. If it isn't, it means that they didn't fill out the actual registration form and are using an automated procedure. I think that if we keep it under the weather and fairly unique, it should do a good deal to combat spam.
scumble on 29/3/2005 at 13:39
It's probably a good idea jer, as people seem incapable of not replying to the spam threads, despite the recent announcement.
Shug on 29/3/2005 at 14:05
To be fair, I believe the anti-spam announcement had disappeared before Convo came back to the boards after having no net connection for a while. I'd leave it up there a while longer.
cabellero on 29/3/2005 at 15:13
Sorry, I posted in one of those Spam threads in Com chat - I wasn't aware of this announcement / thread at the time as I don't check out this forum much, if at all.
