Bot attack?

demeiz · Post by **demeiz** » Wed May 02, 2007 1:06 pm

Whats going on with the bot postings?

I'm pretty sure you can get rid of em..

Tis' kind of annoying

Post by **Scavenger** » Wed May 02, 2007 4:02 pm

I get rid of them every day. Sometimes several times a day...

I am using the built-in anti-spam features of phpBB 2.x. Unfortunately they weren't designed with today's spammers in mind. On the plus side, phpBB 3 is coming out real soon now. (They are in their 5th beta release right now.) I don't want to do a lot of customizing before moving to 3.0.

Post by **Scavenger** » Sun Jun 17, 2007 11:17 pm

Still waiting on phpBB3 but recent attacks made me take action now. We were averaging over a dozen spam registrations a day. (Ironically, the system that I installed a long time ago made most of their registrations useless since their web addresses never showed up in their profiles but they never noticed.) So I have switched spam blocking systems. Now instead of that "capcha" (weird-looking letters and numbers you have to retype when you register), you just have to answer one simple question, "What is your favorite MUD?" As long as the person types in anything like "Barren", "BR", etc., their registration is accepted. Otherwise it is rejected. Bots and non-English speakers can't figure it out so they are blocked.

In the past day that I've had it installed, over 50 attempts were blocked and none got through. (The number is high mostly because it looks like the bots make two attempts before they give up.) So the forums should be relatively safe again.

demeiz · Post by **demeiz** » Wed Jun 20, 2007 9:16 am

That's actualy a really good idea

Hopefully this should keep the forums nice and clean once again.

disaster · Post by **disaster** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 11:01 am

Nice idea. If the spammers ever do figure it out (which is unlikely, but possible) changing the question to "what is the central city in the realms" would do the trick as well.