Starship Asterisk*

We're currently experiencing an outbreak of spam. If the spam has just shown up, please give us a chance to kill it before reporting it so we don't also have to close reports. Thanks!

You must be doing a good job. I haven't noticed any.

Looks like I need to update the Q&A anti-spambot questions.

edit: I added a bunch of new ones and cleared out the old ones. Sorry if I messed any of them up even though I double checked... super sleepy right now

Yes, I noticed quite a few yesterday but none this morning.

You're doing a good job!

Rob

[ Oops! I spoke too soon. The spambots are back. ]

Yeesh! What trash! I think I've swept everything up, but if not, please let me know.

Gads! Meteor showers, spambots, comets, i miss all the good stuff

Spambots? You mean like Xrumer and Wget? I never knew they created spam!

Ugh, I changed up the questions and they are still coming through... I'm not sure if the bots are just reprogrammed to be able to solve my simple scrambled word puzzle or if it's real people actually taking the time to spam us.

Are they signing up as members or just posting as guests? If the latter you can slow them down and perhaps make it not worth their while by using a Captcha for guest posts. (I can see now that you're doing that.) Or better yet, do as many on-line forums do -- out of necessity I'm sure -- turn off non-member posting completely.

Rob

It's both, guests and members.

RobAsGuestJustToTest wrote:Are they signing up as members or just posting as guests? If the latter you can slow them down and perhaps make it not worth their while by using a Captcha for guest posts. (I can see now that you're doing that.) Or better yet, do as many on-line forums do -- out of necessity I'm sure -- turn off non-member posting completely.

Rob

Spam typically comes from only a handful of countries, and though I'm not enthusiastic about it, I'd rather simply ban those countries from posting here than turn off non-member posting. Of course neither is fair to the innocent, but banning posts from specific countries would have a negative impact on fewer people.

owlice wrote:Spam typically comes from only a handful of countries, and though I'm not enthusiastic about it, I'd rather simply ban those countries from posting here than turn off non-member posting. Of course neither is fair to the innocent, but banning posts from specific countries would have a negative impact on fewer people.

True. I do the same thing on a couple of eComm sites I own. Sometimes it's all one can do.

Rob

Looking through the ban lists that bystander and owlice have built up, I can see it would be much easier to exclude any real people from banning than to ban all the spammers. Some IP ranges just don't seem to have real people using them...

You guys are really good at picking off the spam. But today i was fortunate enough to actually get to see a couple of spams before one of you obliterated it.
Kinda like one of those little shooting gallerys, isn't it? The spammers pop up and -click-, you nail the little sucker. Say, does RJN give out cupie dolls or something after you've zapped a certain number of spammers

Oh-oh - something is going on right now...

Ann

Yeah, and wow. I think I've swept it all up. What a mess!

Here's XRumer...

And Wget.

It's super cute how every day I get to ban all of the people who sign up and magically have birthdays the day they sign up. Seriously, if any of you can think of a good anti bot question for the website, please help.

You are fighting against not only sophisticated AI which is capable of looking up simple questions such as "How many legs does a spider have?" and can also perform any arithmetic you throw at it. Yes/No questions are too simple. Spamming services also hire out human CAPTCHA readers to do nothing but break CAPTCHAs all day long, so it's possible that there are some questions that people who visit this forum legitimately should know but a person who doesn't visit wouldn't know the answer to. The questions at the moment are rather simple word unscrambling puzzles to very basic questions that most people should know the answer to.

Let me know if any of you come up with a question you think can stump a bot or even an ignorant human.

You might ask them what this forum is primarily about (APOD, Astronomy) since most of them don't seem to have a clue.

geckzilla wrote:... Let me know if any of you come up with a question you think can stump a bot or even an ignorant human.

Google for "anti-spambot hidden fields technique". You'll get a lot of hints on a possible technique to stop the bots. The idea is that you create a couple of fields with plausible names, then hide them using CSS. Bots fill them in but humans don't because they can't see them. Your code then checks to see if they've been filled in and if they have you deny the registration/post. This is called the "honeypot" technique, by the way.

There is also the checkbox captcha technique. Google that one for instructions. They both have drawbacks and advantages.

Rob

Things seem better.

Watch out now.

Ann

Yeah; had slowed down. I've swept; now to start the banning for the night's mess.

: washes her hands really well :