Help with the spambots requested

[adom-admin]

Today I spent about 45 minutes wading through the new user registrations of the past 15 days or so. Almost 98% of them (that's 200+) probably were spambots. If I deleted folks erroneously please try again and post a bit more of a reason why you would like to join. If I made a mistake it was because your answer made you appear to be a spambot :-) And in some cases I'm still not sure... spambot technology really has matured.

The next step will be to ask for more help from you, the community. I have very little time for things related to ADOM (as you might know) and losing 45 minutes on forum administration really is a big loss in my time management. Thus I would like to install forum administrators with the power to ban users, etc. For that I would love to win experienced and respected forum users. If you would be willing to support the site, please announce it on this thread and I will get back to you.

Here you can find some info about the tools available to a moderator:
http://www.serpentus.info/44/vbullet...ion-explained/

I'm still looking for information on how to allow moderators to also moderate user registrations in vBulletin 3.8. Suggestions welcome.

Thanks for reading and thanks for supporting the site and the game!

[Grey]

I'll be more than happy to fight back against the hordes of spambots threatening to corrupt the forums.

[Soirana]

Signing in for antispambot army too

[rami]

Today I spent about 45 minutes wading through the new user registrations of the past 15 days or so. Almost 98% of them (that's 200+) probably were spambots. If I deleted folks erroneously please try again and post a bit more of a reason why you would like to join. If I made a mistake it was because your answer made you appear to be a spambot :-) And in some cases I'm still not sure... spambot technology really has matured.

That's because these are not actually bots, these are real spammers registering. AI technology is just not sophisticated enough to correctly answer random questions like "Enter the last four letters of "Ancardia". Registrations are made by actual people, and registration data is then fed to spambots. Some spam posts may be even done by actual people as well. Case in point: this user. He made a few meaningful posts, but his signature is filled with obviously spammy links.

Honestly, I've never seen a message board that requires users to write an essay to register Simply promote some respected ancient members to moderators as you said, and let them quickly ban offending users and their posts.

[Laukku]

Both Gray and Soirama seem good mod candidates, as they are some of the most active users in the forums.

Then there's topler, who at one point had the most posts in the forums. He was so active that he posted 2 posts a minute for days. Then all of his posts mysteriously disappeared. Obviously because he was a spambot.

That's because these are not actually bots, these are real spammers registering. AI technology is just not sophisticated enough to correctly answer random questions like "Enter the last four letters of "Ancardia". Registrations are made by actual people, and registration data is then fed to spambots. Some spam posts may be even done by actual people as well. Case in point: this user. He made a few meaningful posts, but his signature is filled with obviously spammy links.

Some bots copypasted the contents of older posts. (Then there was the one which wrote "not good" in an older antispam thread where it was announced that TB was fixing the situation.)

[Grey (dumber than gut)]

Other defenders of Law (of a sort) that I would suggest for this noble quest:

gut
Silfir
Soirana
JellySlayer
vogonpoet

[JellySlayer]

I'd be happy to help out.

FWIW, I think it probably makes sense to follow rami's suggestion. Stick with the automated filter, and have the mods kill any bots who slip through.

[Silfir]

Grey, gut, Soirana, JellySlayer and vogonpoet are all choices I'd heartily second.

Of course, I'm perfectly willing to take up the mantle myself.

[Grey]

If you simply allow user registration as before, but insist that new users must post at least once or their account will be deleted, then every month we can delete all users with 0 posts. Actual spam posts can be cleaned up as we go along.

I also suggest that you make the question/answer require someone to open up their copy of ADOM (or rely on good ADOM knowledge). I suggested some questions in another thread to this effect:

Name a class in ADOM beginning with 'E'.
What race in ADOM is similar to halflings?
Which stat in ADOM starts with 'P' and affects your sight range?

Something like this is hard for non-ADOMers to guess. It might still need to be cycled every year or two in case bots break through by brute force.

[Silfir]

The first is good. The second is sort of okay. The third is much too easy to guess even without any ADOM knowledge.

Some people just like to register so they can use some more features, even if they don't plan to post. I wouldn't want to harass them. How about we do that still, but only if the guy's username has a number in it? We'd just have to post a warning somewhere that if you insist on having a number in your username, you should make a post to escape the spambot-comb.

What I think would be workable is a system by which people can only register for the forum by uploading one of the game's files - like, adom.cnt or adom.ver (those are files that come with winbeta too, can you get them on MacOS?). A seperate site (linked to in the register form) contains the upload prompt that gives you the code that you need to use, if the filename and contents of the uploaded file check out. Should fool any spambot, at least. Of course, also requires programming busywork. If the people with far too much time on their hands that plague this place actually become able to kill spambots, they should be able to keep it all squeaky-clean even with the old registering scheme.