Stop Spam Bot's

[Eejit]

Recently, there have been a number of bot's registering accounts and spamming the forums, such as zhouxiaojie.

Although I hate it myself, maybe something along the lines of CAPTCHA should be included in the sign up process.

[shypike]

We do have a captcha, but it doesn't seem to be effective enough.
My guess is that a bunch of underpaid Chinese people do this manually

[Eejit]

Maybe a limit on the number of post's per day/ hour or minute then?

[shypike]

Good idea, that would make me spend less time on the forum

[sander]

Good idea, that would make me spend less time on the forum

LOL!!!

[sander]

Maybe a limit on the number of post's per day/ hour or minute then?

Most spam-messages are the first post for an account, so post-limit won't help.
Spam on the SAB forums can be recognized by:
- first post of an account, and/or
- commercial URLs in the signature
- useless content like "wow, that's great. thank you"

I think the first two characteristics should be recognized by a machine. Or prevented by a rule: "the first 10 posts of a certain are not allowed to contain any URLs"

[inpheaux]

SMF makes writing arbitrary rules like that difficult. And captchas are pretty much worthless at this point, since they just get humans to do the signing up.

[krackt]

Most spam-messages are the first post for an account, so post-limit won't help.

Enforce a 1 or 2 day posting delay on every new account. i.e. new accounts cannot make their first post until 1 or 2 days after the account is created. I don't think many spammers would be bothered coming back if they couldn't post immediately.

[rascalli]

Most spam-messages are the first post for an account, so post-limit won't help.

Enforce a 1 or 2 day posting delay on every new account. i.e. new accounts cannot make their first post until 1 or 2 days after the account is created. I don't think many spammers would be bothered coming back if they couldn't post immediately.

But that also means when I am new & have a problem I need to wait 2 days ...
Not sure if a lot of users will come back also

[krackt]

But that also means when I am new & have a problem I need to wait 2 days ...
Not sure if a lot of users will come back also

Yes there is always a downside but I don't think genuine users would mind if they are made aware of the reasons. I know I wouldn't mind waiting 1 or 2 days.

[john3voltas]

I would be really angry if I had to wait for 1 or 2 days before I could post.
In fact, I'd be angry as well even if I only had to wait for 1 or 2 hours.
But that's just a spammer talking, lol.

[inpheaux]

Yes there is always a downside but I don't think genuine users would mind if they are made aware of the reasons. I know I wouldn't mind waiting 1 or 2 days.

Waiting periods suck. That's why I haven't implemented them.

[Eejit]

That's why I suggested a limit on the number of post's per day/ hour or minute.

A genuine poster, one with a problem say, will possibly post once, then wait for a reply for possibly 24 hours.
Any limit could be removed once the post count rises over a set amount, say 10.

I can't see a spammer waiting for these sort of  periods, and if they spammed during earlier post's, the account could be deleted.

Just a thought.

[shypike]

We have many one time spammers.