Lemma Soft Forums

Seriously. Spambots will not leave if you tell them to go away/die/shut up, and they do not understand the image memes or videos that you post in response to them. Also, more responses to spambots will increase the likelihood of other spambots joining the forum. Please just report spambots (little red exclamation point in the bottom right corner of the post) and move on.

I'm sorry.... ;_; I always respond to them like "This is a spam right?" TT^TT I did something bad! *kneels down* so sorry!

Btw, I no nor only me but other users were also hammed by a creative post from a spambot... so, how could we possibly avoid answering if it was quite a decent post? *forgive me for asking a probably too dense type of question...

I no nor only me but other users were also hammed by a creative post from a spambot... so, how could we possibly avoid answering if it was quite a decent post?

Maybe we should write up a guide to the Most Common Spambot Types!

First clue - Is it a brand new forum member with less than five posts and no avatar? That doesn't mean it IS a spambot, obviously, just a warning sign that you might want to look closely at the post.

The Incredibly Obvious Spambot will then post nothing but a long string of links. Anyone should be able to tell this is spam.

The Curious Spambot will instead post a new topic starting with a question. Sometimes the question is obviously out of place (like "Where can I buy expensive watches?") but often the question is instead something at least vaguely related to the topic of the forum. Since my forum is clearly labeled 'games', I will get spambots that turn up to ask the seemingly-innocent question "What's your favorite game?" Or else more specific questions - spambots actually visit sites like Yahoo Answers to pluck questions that sound like real people asked them. These look like real posts, but the poster's sig will contain a spam link of some sort.

The Helpful Spambot looks for people ASKING a question it can recognise (Again, they often use Yahoo Answers for data mining) and appears in existing threads to post what it thinks is the answer. If a Helpful spambot encounters a Curious spambot they can cover whole forums in their back-and-forth. However, while the answer it posts was once written by a human, it may be obviously the wrong answer for the real question, and again, the sig will usually give them away.

The Mimic Spambot appears in a long thread on a forum, picks a post that someone made early on, and reposts that exact same text as a new reply. If the thread is long and your memory isn't great, you won't remember that the post has been made before, and since the post was originally made by a human, it looks legit. But you MIGHT remember that it was posted before, or it MIGHT be clearly a bit behind the times (if it's reposting something from the beginning of a conversation which has long since moved on.) And, again, the sig will usually give it away.

The Stealth Spambot is the sneakiest. It behaves like one of the above types, but its posts contain no spam links at all, therefore making forum admins reluctant to ban them... they MIGHT just be confused humans. Then they return days later and, if their posts are still in place, edit the posts to ADD spam links. And since the posts aren't new, it's likely that the spam links will stay there for ages without anyone noticing.

some spambots only send private messages with publicity and they never respond threads - 0 postcount- , are only discovered reporting the moderators

others, have strange byography data - location: human, for example -

@papillon:

That's a very helpful post! Thanks!

---also, i figured that i should stop being the first replier afterall....

EDIT:
Also, can spambots can reply in topics? I might have seen just one(he has a decent answer but his sig has suspicious links)

Spambots can do anything that any other regular poster can do. It's trivial to make them reply, start topics, etcetera.

If in doubt, then report. If they have a solitary post and contain any kind of seemingly irrelevant links in their post, odds on it's a spambot. Replying to them only triggers more spambots, as now they know that this is an active forum with people viewing the spam messages.

Oh no, with advancing spambot, now I couldn't believe anyone. Are you a spambot? ARE YOU!? jk... ^_^

LVUER wrote:Oh no, with advancing spambot, now I couldn't believe anyone. Are you a spambot? ARE YOU!? jk... ^_^

Damn, bullseye! I'm A spambot!!! XDD kidding!

----if i asked the spambot if he's a spambot would he say yes? *this is question is hilariously stupid

>.>' lol papillon I do every one of those things when I'm starting on a forum, or replying to someones question... or starting my own questions... does that make me a spam bot?

Duh, bot means you are not a human, but just a piece of code that mimic what humans do. Like in MMORPG, where you just mindlessly hack and slash monsters and collect loot, you could use bot to do that for you instead (just leave your PC on for several night and let bot do the your dirty job).

You (human) could spam. But you will never be a spambot... since you are a human. Spam itself means you send a bulk amount of message (often in form of advertisement) indiscriminately.

If you start a good post, replying others in good manner and good answer, provides links that other really need, no matter what you are not spamming (even if you ARE a bot).

I wonder if there could be anyway to stop spambots for joining in the community. If there is one, it will be useful.

Maybe some of those authorization codes? Just theorizing.

Lumen_Astrum wrote:Maybe some of those authorization codes? Just theorizing.

You're talking Captcha. But I'd hate to submit a Captcha for every single post I want to make.

I don't remember... do you need one of these for registration? If not, this could probably be implemented, couldn't it?

yes, a Captcha should be asked on registration, to minimize it, at the very least.

Right now, there is a captcha on registration. We also test the user's IP address against the a dozen blocklists, and there's another (quite funny) test involving timezones on the registration form. I suspect that we're actually blocking most spambots. There were over 300 attempted spam registrations today, blocked by the forum software - and it's only 11am where I am.

What I think that we're getting is the next step up from a spambot - a human that's paid to register on forums and reply to messages, things like that. I'm not sure how to stop such people.

I am considering restricting creating signatures until a user has 5-10 posts, to make it more expensive for spammers to succeed. I'm also debating refusing all-link signatures, but that would block Papillion's, for example. It's really hard - Alcatraz is plenty secure, but would you want to live there?

I think the amount of spam is low enough that we don't really need much more security. Just hit the "!" button to report a spam post and move along. XD