Small antispam update

[Dan]

I have made a small update to the code for the registration page and posting page to help stop spam bots.

If you get any errors saying something about you being a bot, let me know via dan@compsci.ca.

[mother teresa]

you got it

[SNIPERDUDE]

Will do.

[rdrake]

I'm not convinced it worked. I just had to delete a dozen or so spam posts in OT.

[Dan]

rdrake @ 12th February 2010, 12:29 pm wrote:

I'm not convinced it worked. I just had to delete a dozen or so spam posts in OT.

I'm not convinced there bots now, that or the bots acuataly navigate threw each page like a person would and can do captchas.

Edit: For example the last spammer was on the site for over 16 minuets and had 79 page hits to make there spam posts.

[SNIPERDUDE]

I don't imagine there's too much we can do about human spammers.

[Dan]

I have just added a new feature to the report function which will hide a topic and flag it for review if enough users report it.

Obviously abuse of this new feature will lead to your acount being banned, so don't report topics just to remove a post you disagree with.


Edit: All posted links will also have rel="nofollow" added to them to discourage PR related spam.

[Insectoid]

What's that do? PR related spam?

[rdrake]

insectoid @ Sun Feb 28, 2010 6:47 pm wrote:

What's that do? PR related spam?

That's the idea. Even if they still do it it won't benefit them in any way.

[Insectoid]

I was asking what rel="nofollow" does and what PR related spam is.

[rdrake]

It stops spiders from following those links. This reduces the grow in page rank of the links posted by spammers.

[BigBear]

How do you get past Capatcha? I don't want a script or program I just want to know the theory behind it.

Does it screen shot the screen and try to solve the word?

[ProgrammingFun]

You could also ban sites such as 10minutemail.com or mail.com giving artificial emails to register bots and require real email addresses instead.

If someone turns out to be a bot or spammer, you could then ban that email from registering new accounts (or ban multiple accounts on 1 email in the first place).

Just thinking....I don't know if you have already implemented this tho.

[Tony]

BigBear @ Tue Apr 06, 2010 6:00 pm wrote:

Does it screen shot the screen and try to solve the word?

Send the captcha elsewhere. There are a lot of people willing to solve captchas all day long for _very cheap_

[Tony]

ProgrammingFun @ Tue Apr 06, 2010 6:48 pm wrote:

or ban multiple accounts on 1 email in the first place

That is typically the case. A lot of places use email as the primary user id, so those are forced to be unique.

But getting a new email address is virtually free and trivially automated.