Bot resistant registration process..

[bigjoe]

We need one :( They are starting to tick me off.

EDIT:Just went into the registration thing to check it out.. we have a recaptcha.. how are they getting around that?

[Pineconn]

Hmm... I take it that the software to get around them is pretty solid. Could we potentially also add a field that states "7 plus 5 equals..."? They seem to work pretty well, and we don't get any spam in the quest database with it.

[Hermit]

It wouldn't matter. It's just a simple matter of processing page code. The more complex we make things, the smarter the bots are programmed for.

I've seen bots that can bypass pretty much aything so... good luck with that.

[AtmaWeapon]

We need one :( They are starting to tick me off.

EDIT:Just went into the registration thing to check it out.. we have a recaptcha.. how are they getting around that?

Set up Amazon Mechanical Turk account. Offer $0.01 per captcha busted. Profit.

There's a few "do odd jobs for money" sites that pay roughly equivalent prices for "run this tool and enter all of the captchas, make $0.01 per captcha defeated." More advanced ones are likely some of those "Make an extra $400 per month from your computer" and have you voluntarily lend a hand with a botnet.

Why? Links on forums/blog comments/social networking sites are good Google juice. A sleazebag "SEO expert" will charge a few thousand for boosting Google page rank and have a loyal crew of slave labor do the spamming for him, probably to the tune of 1% of his total take. The business sees themselves jump from whatever crappy page rank to some higher rank and they're happy (until they go out of business because you can't SEO your way to sales.)

The only real solution is to make sure the forum software put the rel="nofollow" attribute on all URL links. Search engines take this as a sign to ignore this link when calculating a page's score. If everyone would do this, most of the efforts of the spammers would be neutered. Too bad they'll still be able to get residual sales via superstition. So it's not a solution so much as a mitigation.

*edit*
I take that back. There's a few surefire solutions:

Close/moderate registration.
Moderate access to the url tag; maybe require 50 posts or the whim of a staff member.
Charge money for registration.

#1 is a bad idea for a forum that wants to grow. An invite-only forum's membership only grows if the forum brings something that people want. That generally means warez or porn.

#2 is a bad idea because it pisses people off. The best way to generate discussion on a nearly-dead forum is to post a link to an article that the members will likely want to debate. People are lazy and requiring a copy/paste for the link is going to stop 99% of people from bothering.

#3 is a bad idea for the same reasons as #1, but you have to make people think it's worth the money.

[Mercy]

What is with the recent trend of shill-links in signatures? I agree with Atma' on the negatives of tighter programmed moderation of the boards. Anything that hinders members' abilities to freely post is bad. On that note, do new members with less than, say.., ten posts really need to be able to include links in signatures?

-m.

[MottZilla]

I don't think links in the signature is an issue since they can always put the URL in which is still advertising. Just moderators taking care of spam bots is the only thing really that effective.

[Nicholas Steel]

Do what Team17 do, pre-moderate the first 10~ posts a new user makes before they become visible and probably prevent the use of a signature until you reach 50 posts so that it will become more obvious when a BOT does post.

[AtmaWeapon]

I don't think links in the signature is an issue since they can always put the URL in which is still advertising. Just moderators taking care of spam bots is the only thing really that effective.

Ahh, but it's less effective for the spammer in all aspects. I won't copy/paste a text link unless it comes from someone with a reputation for providing quality. Even then, I usually wait for 4 or 5 people to indicate it's hot stuff. Spammers know this, and so do the sleazeballs that employ them. No links = no paycheck.

Search engines don't pay attention to a URL unless it's the href attribute of the HTML A tag. No links = no Google juice = no paycheck.

Most spammers are either mechanical turks (as described above) or people running scripts. Odds are if they see "you aren't allowed to edit your signature/use URL tags" most scripts will bail and move on to the next forum. Same with people; if you're getting paid $0.01 per site you hit you aren't going to waste a lot of time trying to figure out if non-links count.

Spammers don't really spend that time per site. On another forum I frequent, we sometimes get bombarded with ad links for one site multiple times in a row. Eventually one of the moderators gets amused enough to add the URL to the site's profanity filter, rendering it completely useless. The spammers don't even notice. The most recent outbreak has been 5-6 posts advertising whatever "http://*********************" was before it gets censored every day. If they're not even paying attention to whether their link comes through intact, I doubt they'd do much to get around "You must have 10 posts to use a URL tag." Even if they do, they're a mindless automaton bent on getting *something* on the forum whether it satisfies their employer or not: you can't defeat these.

Here's the way I see it balance if it takes 10 posts to use the URL tag:
Good users:
A slight frustration. They'll post the text and we'll have to copy/paste. If they deliver 10 solid gold posts they get the pleasure of giving links to 6 people on an internet forum. If they complain we'll make fun of them and chase them away.

Bad users:
Many won't bother posting. The ones that do are most certainly robots that would post no matter what. Note that some of the most active threads on the forums lately were created by spammers. Interesting.

Completely moderating posts is a *bad* idea on this forum at this time. We have maybe 3 active threads per week, and there's lingering issues with the forums software that indicates the staff isn't fully invested in the site anymore. If I were a new member today and I had to make 10 posts at AGN to gain the privilege of making a post without help, I'd just go join one of the zillion other gaming forums with a dozen active members instead. I'm not sure what the staff wants, but I presume more members would be in line with it. We need more *good* members, and putting up barriers to entry won't make that happen. Good members tend to be the kind of people who have better things to do than post on internet forums.

[Nicholas Steel]

iirc only 2 staff members (Darkdragon, Warlord) has the ability to manipulate the forum code while the rest are just moderators with the ability to ban and edit sub-forums etc.

[bigjoe]

Look at them in the Who's Online list... disobeying the rules like they're SO COOL. :mad: