Spam

[Samu-kun]

You know, isn't it time that somebody changed posting privileges in the renpy forum so that guest spam bots can't constantly attack it? It only takes 3 minutes to make a new account and the flood of spam to hit the forum recently isn't worth keeping the renpy forum open for guests. If anything, it probably just drives people away, since it makes a ) the forums seem unsafe for browsing and b ) makes everything more disorganized.

[Ramidel]

It's a trap.

See, whenever an anonymous user posts to the RenPy forum, their IP is logged and a spoofed message is sent to 4chan asking for Yotsuba furry porn!

[PyTom]

I've tried banning the IPs of the spammers. If they come back, I'll disable anonymous posting.

[luminarious]

Could we just disable anonymous posts with 'http' or 'www' in them?

[LVUER]

Perhaps we could just disable guest/anonymous posting. Lots of forum do that and I think having must to register won't discourage people that truly interested in forums. After all, it's only several minutes and it's free...

[PyTom]

I'd like to avoid disabling anonymous posting if I can - but if there's another day like today, then I probably will have to.

[IceD]

It seems single spam posts that are appearing randomly aren't the only ones. I came on a whole thread made by spambot (already reported this). There might be more of them coming

Anonymous is sorta fun in some situations and gives the freedom of speech, but not in case when spam poses a threat to the stability of the forums.

[edit]

Now, really... Another one

[Ren]

Anonymous is sorta fun in some situations and gives the freedom of speech,

I'm a bit puzzled by this, I'd have thought you can say pretty much anything you want, most of the times.
And if some rules are too strict, they'll apply to your guest posts as well.

Personally, I don't get any satisfaction in using guest posts for anything else than useful things I might know in forums where I don't want to join (say, replying to a tablet thread in a forum I'm not really interested in joining, for various reasons). This is one reason that would make me wary of making guest posts impossible: I happened to want to contribute to this or that conversation before in forums where I only hung around for a short while, and I ended up being a bit put off by the inability to just point out a brand or a program because guests posts were disabled.

It could be just me, but I don't always want to spend time registering to a forum, maybe wait for the admin to make an account for me just because of that. It may also depend on the amount of time one has, mind.

[Ramidel]

Well, we've been attacked again, so...

[yummy]

I suggest to move over the simple captcha check (which is actually a real hassle because it's ineffective).
There's a way to counter this for some time since these spam bots aren't yet intelligent enough: you might want to add some question filter that's universal and easy to answer, without being a system that makes the ordinary user flee in despair because one can't post without being scanned and tripled checked just to see if you're human (just imagine: "hey you miss a toe! you're not human.").

On my devblog, some random bot was posting comments saying just how beautiful my posts were (I can't really deny its sense of taste though) and even with a spam preventing module I added (akismet for wordpress).
So I searched for a while and ended on an article about captcha being harmful to user web navigation experience and how to circumvent this by using intelligence schemes.

For now, there are no spambot that possesses an advanced IA which would be able to answer a simple question like "what colour is the sky?".
Just imagine: I added this question as a condition for validating a comment post and the spam dropped to 0. And without captcha!

So maybe if you just still allowed anonymous users to posts, but added a simple captcha plus this intelligence scheme test, the spam would just go to the deep depths of the infinite void (at least for a couple of years).

[Jake]

For now, there are no spambot that possesses an advanced IA which would be able to answer a simple question like "what colour is the sky?".

Unfortunately, your description here also highlights one flaw of such a system, especially on a forum like this: some seemingly-obvious questions have different answers in different languages, cultures and locales. (The bit I'm talking about is your 'IA'; it's 'AI' in English.)

If you ask what colour the sky is, then people from Britain or Seattle will answer "grey" (or "gray") and not be let in; people who have learned bad habits and poor spelling might answer "blu" and not get let in; people who just don't know English well enough at all might look at a machine translation somewhere and answer "azure" because that's what the literal translation is of the word they use in their language to describe the sky; in English it's a perfectly good answer, but probably not what the site is expecting. I'd expect that maths questions are the most universal, but also the easiest for spam-bots to automatically detect, calculate and answer.



It's not a bad idea, mind, and I know I'd be tempted if it was reasonably easy to set up to add it were I running the forum. But the question/s would have to be chosen carefully. And of course, if there's a PHPBB plug-in which adds this functionality, you can bet there's spam software which recognises the default set of questions and knows the answers.

[unknown5]

...
For now, there are no spambot that possesses an advanced IA which would be able to answer a simple question like "what colour is the sky?".

muahahahahah ...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wh ... the+sky%3F
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ho ... n+a+day%3F
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wh ... of+life%3F

not perfect, but interesting nonetheless ...

[KimiYoriBaka]

how about showing a picture of a hand and asking how many fingers it's holding up?

[IceD]

Simpler... how many dots are on the picture...

[Samu-kun]

It doesn't seem like these fancy spam prevention tactics are really necessary, because it appears that Pytom removed guest posting privileges and that has stopped the spam.