SillyDog701

[Antony]

Unfortunately, SillyDog701 Message Centre has been under forum spamming attacks. We have received a huge number of bot registrations.

As a counter measure, the registrations will be semi-open for the time being.

I apologise for the inconvenience.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.0 Firefox/3.6.13

[Antony]

Testing reCAPTCHA, I will monitor if it reCAPTCHA works well.

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[James]

Why not give buttons to your mods to help you control the amount of spamming that gets through?

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[Antony]

I want to prevent them from registering at the first place (the spam bots). Like I used to do in previous version.

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[James]

I agree. Your way is much better. BTW.. I also can't stand spammers.

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[Antony]

A number of private changes to the phpBB scripts have been implemented. The goal is to reduce the spam-bot or spammers using special scripts on forum registrations.

Unfortunately, there's no way to prevent those (hard working) spammers actually loading the web pages and gone through every steps like actual user.

Well, hope this works on reducing the number of spams (and spam accounts).

For the security purpose, I will not disclose the implementation in detail.

For those who are interested, a quick measure of 24 hours period, there were 62-spam-account registrations received.

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[Antony]

After the new private implementation (prevent mass spam registrations), we finally had the first spammer got through about two hours ago. That spammer spend about 80 minutes posting about 10 similar spams.

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[Edward]

After the new private implementation (prevent mass spam registrations), we finally had the first spammer got through about two hours ago. That spammer spend about 80 minutes posting about 10 similar spams.

ReCaptcha didn't stop it??

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[Antony]

ReCaptcha didn't stop it??

No. In my theory, they have a group of human based workforce, using special scripts while entering the captcha or recaptcha by human.

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[Edward]

Just like the virus writers, the spammers are always going to be one step ahead of everyone else.

If ReCaptcha has any type of support (online or otherwise), have you brought this up with them? They should be in a position to recommend something.

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[Antony]

Well, there's the thing...
no matter how good the anti-bot scripts are, they won't be able to stop human spammers from registering.

Since my private implementation, we have stopped mass (script-based) registering from Russian and many eastern European based registrations. We do have a few got through, those were from China.

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[Edward]

So it sounds like it's getting better, not perfect, but better.

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