Loads of Spam Accounts?

[Head Guardian Sophiles Phylax]

When I look at the members page and I go to the newest members, there are pages upon pages of what looks like bot accounts. They all possess nonsensical websites, skypes, signature, random locations, etc.

I am assuming this is known and the fix is to just manually delete them, which obviously takes lots of time. I just wanted to make sure this was known. Thanks for your efforts, as always.

...

 

[High Priest Zevios Metathronos]

They might be as much as 12000-14000 by now. They spam register. Really difficult and closely impossible to kick them out.

Some days, over 1500 spam posts to sort through. Almost daily.

We are doing what we can. They send them in droves. Thankfully, the website holds fine with the load. We also get attacked on the site daily at the same time.

 

[The Alchemist7 [SG]]

They might be as much as 12000-14000 by now. They spam register. Really difficult and closely impossible to kick them out.

Some days, over 1500 spam posts to sort through. Almost daily.

We are doing what we can. They send them in droves. Thankfully, the website holds fine with the load. We also get attacked on the site daily at the same time.

Why not setting in place a CAPTCHA or security questions?

 

[Apprentice]

Why not setting in place a CAPTCHA or security questions?

+1
I'm not exactly a website dev but captcha should help against automated bots.

 

[The Alchemist7 [SG]]

I'm not exactly a website dev but captcha should help against automated bots.

I'm thinking that maybe some CAPTCHA apps (especially reCAPTCHA which is owned by google) can collect (steal) private information from websites. I'm not sure if this is true but there must be a software that helps againsts bots and is not tied to google or is not collecting informations. But I think those who are in knowledge of web development, which is the case for HP Zevios, can develop their own security means to prevent bots from registering and posting. For example they might be able to put a question in the registration form asking how much is 3 x 3 or things like this, questions which bots cannot automatically answer. Even if bots are set to answer certain questions, I think it still takes less time to find more complicated questions or measures than manually deleting thousands of messages every day. Is an opinion from someone who doesn't have any major knowledge in this domain, who knows maybe there are reasons which HP knows better for why these security measures are not set here on the forums.

 

[Peter]

I have led many forums.
I think there is only one solution, but to transform the whole forum.
I would recommend an SMF forum system from the outset and make it closed, the forums should only be visible after registration.
Registration should be subject to 5 security questions. But the answer to these questions will only be known to one who is truly an informed Satanist. In this case, however, we would exclude interested people from the outset. However, this is so useful that usually new people, the questions they ask are written down on JOS anyway, are just lazy to read.

 

[Edward Lonsa]

They might be as much as 12000-14000 by now. They spam register. Really difficult and closely impossible to kick them out.

Some days, over 1500 spam posts to sort through. Almost daily.

We are doing what we can. They send them in droves. Thankfully, the website holds fine with the load. We also get attacked on the site daily at the same time.

I had this issue with this platform too. In their forums I found advise to try to change the code of the entrance page: where people register - just go to root of the forum, find register page and change its source code. Make invisible or unimportant alterations in the fields so that the bots can't force their code into yours because they are designed to work with standard code of the given release.

Such things as captcha does not help they say, at least it did not help me.

 

[High Priest Zevios Metathronos]

I have led many forums.
I think there is only one solution, but to transform the whole forum.
I would recommend an SMF forum system from the outset and make it closed, the forums should only be visible after registration.
Registration should be subject to 5 security questions. But the answer to these questions will only be known to one who is truly an informed Satanist. In this case, however, we would exclude interested people from the outset. However, this is so useful that usually new people, the questions they ask are written down on JOS anyway, are just lazy to read.

It is HPS Pythia's will and has been, all these years, to make the forums maximum open [open to read for all], accessible to all [achieved this] and the registration should be the easiest, because many people cannot be bothered with many things. Unfortunately, the ease is where the bot issues lie.

I totally get your point, but we cannot deviate from this.