Spambot Management

[CK1]

Do you guys think the amount of spambots that register are a problem? Looking at the Member List; there is a daily wave of bots getting through the cracks. I'm pretty sure the spam accounts are done by 1 or 2 bots. The consistencies I notice are that: the user is always 24 yrs old, Female, located in new york and places a spam URL in their UP description.

I guess there probably isn't much that can be done anyways as their IP address probably keeps changing.

[Bositman]

Well after looking into it I deleted about 500 spam bot users and banned the range of that botnet. It doesn't seem like anyone else uses it so that's good. Let's see how that plays out.

Thanks for the reports btw

[CK1]

Well that's good to know; but I think there's still more. On the most recent page; I counted 4 bots that aren't banned

Never mind, it's all good 

[Bositman]

Banning them does nothing in these cases, these bots are just there to have the link in their profile page and give fake google SEO rankings, so deletion is the way to go.

After looking around more I've deleted about 1000 accounts, but it seems there are A LOT more -_- At least now there is no account with 0 posts and something in their URL field.

What's funny is that the best way to find bots is checking if the ICQ number field is filled, since no sane person uses ICQ these days. And I just found about 68K accounts with ICQ number set to 0 I can't even delete em from the cpanel since the SQL time outs
Edit: It turns out stupid mybb sets it as 0 by default if you leave it empty so that won't help

[rama]

We've never had to manage thousands of bots in short notice. Afaik there's quite a few anti-bot measures active, too.

So, what happened?

[Bositman]

It wasn't bots Almost all bots should be deleted now AFAIK (they were around 4k in total, but accumulated the past 2-3 years)

[rama]

Well, yea, I've come to understand that it's mostly humans with tools these days.
We really need to make it hard for them to semi-automate the registration process.

[Blyss Sarania]

Well one thing I could think of is check the registration time. It's possible bot registrations are really really quick compared to humans?

Another one is the security question. It's been a wee bit since I registered but isn't it something like "What console does PCSX2 emulate?"

Perhaps we should make it more difficult, but still reasonable.

[refraction]

Well one thing I could think of is check the registration time. It's possible bot registrations are really really quick compared to humans?

I think we have that, I remember testing how long I could humanly sign up knowing all the options and it was something like 20 seconds, so I think it's set to a minimum of that.

Another one is the security question. It's been a wee bit since I registered but isn't it something like "What console does PCSX2 emulate?"

Perhaps we should make it more difficult, but still reasonable.

We could add new questions but the possibility is somebody has actually worked out the questions and added them to the bot, so it knows how to answer. We don't want to make it more difficult for other users who are legitimately trying to sign up but may not have much knowledge of the emulator (obviously keeping the absolute retards out ). But when we did them, we decided they were difficult enough.

[CK1]

I removed the remains of what shouldn't have been here in the first place