Topic: bot made accounts - page 2. (Read 2832 times)

I noticed that the current camptcha system for registering accounts is quite different than the one used before.



It looks like this and each leter consists of a different image now. Maybe that's supposed to be more secure? I still see the same letters after several reloads though.

Xrumer and many forum posting bots has built in OCR or Optical Character Recognition which enable the bots to read the captcha.

I agree. Like I said in my previous posts, it's not really affecting the majority of the community at the moment. They are being dealt with swiftly. All the people it is affecting only need to report the thread. The suggestion was something which would in theory work to some extent, but would be a hassle for some moderators. As long as people are reporting these bots, then there's no real concern unless they get out of hand. But, I can't see that happening as you would only need a few extra moderators to handle the workload.

I think putting any post in a queue when a newbie includes a link, could be something to consider though. There shouldn't be too many posts which have links in them and the ones that normally do are referrals, virus or these bots. I know there are valid reasons for links too, that's where the whitelist would come into effect, again I don't really know how busy moderators are so can't really assume that this would be efficient and this system wouldn't justify getting more moderators.

Already. But if they have a possibility, then others may register for the same purpose.

The report function works very well.

Report it to mods, via the link you have at the bottom of your PM! 

And prohibit send private messages. One of them sent me spam about http://dogecoindouble.com/   

And delete 0 message account every X months

There is a captcha to create an account, how do they go over it?

Though I'm not entirely against whitelisting first posts I think it's a bit overkill and this would be a hell of a lot more work for mods. I think having a captcha for the first few posts would be a better option though some bots would likely still slip through the cracks though they're manageable.

You must be referring to the panda/penguin updates. However, PR6 forum backlinks are still considered valuable by many. I'm not sure how the updates actually would have affected them but I'm still seeing them being sold here and there.

I wonder when will they stop, if they ever? It's just boosting member count with no purpose.

The only thing I could think of is having the very first posts of a newbie to be whitelisted, via the mods. Therefore, the public wouldn't see it, but the moderators would. This could become overwhelming quickly though. You want to try and keep the restrictions to a minimum. Even this system isn't that great I can see a few reasons why it would be a problem. Maybe, if a user posts a link while they are a newbie, that's the only time it will appear in the whitelist queue. Thus, eliminating normal users from censorship (there would be complaints about this no doubt) obviously, there would be workarounds for this.

I still think there's not much need as they do get handled quickly and without much fuss.  It's annoying yes.

That would just spam the newbie jail, it would be concentrated in one area rather than all over the board. It would make it easier to spot, but moderators and some users do report via the patrol page so it that case it wouldn't be much of a difference. The newbie section is quite useful for new comers that actually have a sensible question or topic to discuss. I disagreed with removing the newbie jail at first, but it was a better move and I back the idea of keeping it from returning.

Not every newbie has money before coming to the forum, they come to the forum to learn about Bitcoin, ask questions and get into discussion before they even think of purchasing any BItcoin. It might not be a lot of money, but I don't think this is the answer.

Maybe the 40% of newbies account don't have bitcoin , the "unique" solution would be the newbie jail.

Google updated the page rank algorithm in late 2013/early 2014 IIRC. With that update spammed backlinks are no longer a valid form to increase the rank of a page. There even was a wave of spammers that begged popular blogs to remove their spam posts, quite funny.

Just report them. They usually get dealt within a few minutes if you report them. They seem to come in waves though and then die off for a while and then come back again. There's no easy way to prevent this, if we restricted personal text and signature they can still post, if we stop newbies opening a thread they'll just post in a already made topic. At the moment they get dealt wiith pretty quickly, so not a lot of people will see their personal text or signature unless you are looking through the member list or the modlog.

Proposal : fee of 0.001 to make a new account, re-distributed every week to exisiting members that posted since the last draw.

+1. It should disallowed at least for newbies. Hopeffully having this bot made accounts reduced to garbage - for SEO's ends - until they reach a minimum activity of 30 would be enough to solve such issue.

I guess signatures and personal infos need to be altered by hand. And not sure if only admins can do it.

They just make a single post in off-topic section, with a misleading subject and then disappear.