Spam, Spam, Spam on the EAB

[mrbob2]

Yes im takin the p but whats with all the adds appearing selling phones? there not even RETRO phones at that! Not something i really want to see on an amiga forum......

[Ironclaw]

No use in taking this up as these bots will always come here and spam now and then.... yes, bots (as you don't seem to know that they are not human). All EAB can do is to ban them and remove the threads, but new ones will come.....

[mrbob2]

MMm been on here for years but never really seen any bots before. I saw 1 post and assumed that an amiga fan was just selling an item as most usually do. Its not a nice thing to see on here as it kinda makes it look trashy. If i was a mod id be deleting them with a passion! Spam thier email addy or something nasty mwu ha ha ha ha (evil beard stroking laugh)

[Graham Humphrey]

They do get deleted with a passion. We've had loads recently, it's getting silly and we're all rather fed up with it. I have to say the global mods do a great job in clearing all these things up.

[Shoonay]

There should be a tricky known-only-to-Amigans question during registering so they would not do so in the first place...

[Galahad/FLT]

Its quite easy to stop this from happening, all that needs to be done is the image/text verification at the sign up procedure to stop bots from being able to get an account.

[alexh]

Bots can now do most of the image/text verification, especially ones which are designed for forums. A custom solution is always best, perhaps a couple Amiga related questions... there is no way a bot could guess them.

[Graham Humphrey]

Let's hope RCK is taking note

[nathey]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Its quite easy to stop this from happening, all that needs to be done is the image/text verification at the sign up procedure to stop bots from being able to get an account.

Aye the use of Captcha would be suffient. Would the bullitin board require an extra price for it to be implemented though?

[dirkies]

as a moderator on a different board, I had to implement the function you cannot post until I approved the new entry (I get an email if one has registered)
Not the best way, but it reduced the spam to zero. But now I do spend a lot of time deleting bogus accounts and blocking many keywords in their names and/or domains!

I think questions here like: what was the model name of the first Amiga: so they have to answer 1000. Or more stupid trivia questions like, what is Bin Laden's first name or so

[Graham Humphrey]

I think the trouble of using questions is that some people may genuinely not know the answer to them. It would definitely stop the spammers but it may also stop some genuine users too.

[CodyJarrett]

With a new user approval system it would be difficult to know that if the users are spammers until they post. The usernames are sometimes mobile phone related but often they aren't.

[alexh]

Cant we add a custom requester to the entry form where you have to type "COMMODORE" (or something).

I dont see people tweaking their BBS SPAM script just for us?

[Npl]

if bots already pass image-verification, why not post soundsamples - you know amiga had that narrator.device so that would be easy to do, and nostalgic on top
Im sure its not harder to do speech-recognisation, but aslong its not common, it might be enough to keep those bots off

[Ian]

I used to get loads of bots at my site, a simple hack from vbulletin.org has stopped them all dead, despite the fact my site runs on an outdated version of vbulletin with the crappy image verification that they have since updated.

There's no excuse for them here

[mrbob2]

Theres an image verication system on at the moment, words and letters mixed with images of dogs and cats, you have to select the words with only the cat image inside. It takes me MANY attempts to get right!

Im a member of quite a few forums, many have pictures of words that are rotated/different colours and sizes. Is it true these "bots" can bypass them? sorry for being dumb but how do these bots work exactly, surely they dont "see" the picture do they?

[bLAZER]

No they can't. Artifical intelligence isn't that smart yet. Some easy ones they can interpret, though. Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

[mrbob2]

Thanks for that. I used to hate doing checks but now i see that its needed my mods to keep scammin scumbags away. I guess one way would be all posts that contain certain words like "for sale" should automatically go to the mods for checking before release to the forum. A section dedicated to people selling amiga/comp hardware on here would help also, so if someone posted a "for sale" thread in nostalgia, it would simply be deleted. The users fault for not reading the rules lol

[Graham Humphrey]

Originally Posted by mrbob2

A section dedicated to people selling amiga/comp hardware on here would help also

Ahem

[Shoonay]

How about a bot-only section, so they could feed on their own flesh?