Auto forum spammers

Hello

Recently all my forums have started being spammed by various bots. I get 5-6 bots every day registering.They even bypass the letter-protection thingy that is required when registering ! I use phpbb.

These bots have a link in theirs status page and sometimes make various posts with links to various sites.

So i was wondering if any of you know such a program ...

 

If you already set for captcha or image verification to block spam then you have to check if it work or not.

You can test by post without enter code from image verification and see if it show any error or it can post sucessful. You also check if image show in random or show same very time when open or refresh the page.

I don't think that spammer has good tools to extract code from image automatic.

 

No despite popular believe, captcha is note secure and there are algos around capable to crack it in a now time.

As a first option. you can make captcha more difficult to read for bots, but it also mean that some humans will not enter it properly.

You may pay somebody to make small enhancement to the forum engine. The simplest one is to check for human action in the OnClick javascript event. Humans will click the submit button, and the OnCLick event can set the value of a hidden input. In the next step, a script will verify that the value was set properly. Bots will generally submit the form without firing the OnCLick event.

Other possibility is replacing the captcha by a question and answer system most humans will easily answer etc.

 

I use a birthday date pattern. Seemed to have solved my problem.

Roger

 

One thing I have noticed is that 999 times out of a 1000 the bots will fill out one or more of the extended fields in the signup form (for example the homepage field.) One thing you can do is add a line to your sign up form stating "Please do not fill out the extended form fields as these are used to catch bots." That way, genuine signups will not fill those fields and those that have it filled out will be bots. Then run a cron job overnight to remove the accounts with the extended forms filled out Works great for me.

 

i hate spamer

 

I saw that kind of bots, they are amateur spammers who never receive any traffic or links from their site because they are easily banned

 

I believe he is looking for the spam software and not the solution... lol i hope im wrong

 

yes i am looking for a program as i say in the last line of my post

 

iv seen these sorts of bots loads of times, what i did on my forums was to just employ lots more mods and have them remove spammy threads and delete spam members. That was the only idea i could come up with at the time. I hate spammey bots there really annoying.

 

Even if i knew where to find it i would not tell you. My forum gets hit by this crap every day. If i knew the person who wrote that program id go and blowtorch his feet... Well... May be not so extreme... Just slap em with a wet fish a few times and unload a lorry full of junk mail into his back garden...

 

I think blow torching feet is a much deserved punishment some peaples forums have been effected more than others some are full of porn bots posts like a few of myne.

 

We ban about 99.99 % of all .ru domains...that solves most of it for us.

 

yep I know the site of the software, but don't ask i won't tell you where to get it but it is from a russian. Just block all .ru emails and russian ips, you might lose a member or two but your spam will be cut down by at least 90%.

 

There's a sweet irony in us all responding to this thread with suggestions on how to overcome what the OP is requesting

To the OP: there's a PHP class called Snoopy that you can use to create auto-sign up scripts. I've used it for other purposes, and it works admirably.

 

I have a system where instead of the letter images they have to answer a question with images.

i.e.: select the butterfly. The user must click on the butterfly, otherwise the signup is flagged as a spammer.

 

dependig on your forum software their should be a mod for alternate image verification, one that the spammers wont bother to crack since everyone uses the default

 

Everything doesn't always seem to be bots. There are people posting legit questions that actually fit with the Forum category. If the question is good actually I leave it.