Topic: What's up with all those spam bots? (Read 1751 times)

Someone has a really big agenda against Theymos. Just ignore them, the accounts get nuked. Hope Theymos finds a fix though, they're pissing me off

Exactly this; Just let Moderators do his job and if everybody wants to have this forum clean, just need to be fair enough while you post and use the "Report to moderator" button when you see all those spam bots, contribute and help yourself...

Somewhere there is a man in his underwear, sitting at a computer.  Likely he has hairy arms and his computer screen hasn't been wiped in years, and he's probably smoked something recently that didn't come in a pack of 20.  Pupils very dilated.  And all this man can think of doing is to create one account after another here at bitcointalk and to string words and pseudo-words into short combinations that reflect his burgeoning insanity. 

That guy is not me, by the way.  Just saying.

Well the bot gets to "decide" when to act, all we can do is react. Sign up restrictions that are not also restricting legit new users are hard to come up with. If you have an idea, let us know.


PS: Props to the admin/global mod(?) that merged the topics.

Yes but... The bot acts faster than we do. It would be much more convenient if we just had some sort of sign up restriction.

They are appearing every minute.

it seems that they are generating thread at a faster rate than the banned one, at this point it look like they are not being banned

the spammer is going serious with this

"Report to moderator" -> spam -> done. Most of them are removed within the minute the post is created.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/hilarious-bots-posting-nonsense-whats-the-point-1278196

I've seen many posts made on bitcoin discussion that is completely not understandable and meaningless. The accounts made seem to have randomly generated characters.

Something has to be done.

Yeah. There's a crapton of them on bitcoin discussion. I'm getting real annoyed, they don't even make any sense. Meh, more posts to report, increase my accuracy.

If someone bans an account, they make a new one.
If someone bans an ip, they get a new one.

D: Dynamic IP
IB: IP Ban
B: Ban

Account #1 IP: 11.1.1.1 - > Gets banned
moves on to
Account #2 IP: 11.1.1.1 - > Gets IP banned
moves on to new IP
Account #3 IP: 12.1.1.1 -> Gets IP banned

etc

It's easy to bypass any ban if you know what to do. Spam bots will always be here, and the post limits just annoy the legit members who want to post but can't.

From what I have read, patrollers do make reasonable amounts of BTC. So that shouldn't be a problem. 

For registering an account im perfectly ok with a captcha, but not with the first X posts. There are still new humans coming here, asking for help, trying to understand bitcoin.

The same reason the people are FUDing and trolling on the forum. They do have some hidden agenda. Either they are paid to do so by someone or they want to lower the price or they hate Bitcoin, etc..

If you want to be annoying and all you have to do is write a small script, it could be worth it.

Now I am glad we have that newbie posting restriction. I was against it some time ago but now I see this as good way of defending forum from these 'spam nonsense' attacks.

it's more like 0.5 per 1000 captcha, so very cheap, check 2captcha

it will not work not even as a deterrent

More than 3 threads about it by now(first two listed on the second post). Mine(the first one) : https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/new-spamming-botdifferent-post-style-and-yeah-had-to-make-this-thread-1275923
I believe 3rd party captchas are not used due to any exploit potentially facilitated by them, could be wrong on this one, as I remember seeing it vaguely posted by a staff/moderator/admin. At any rate, this is what patrollers are "paid" to do, they get removed within minutes if not seconds, so they are nothing more than an annoyance if you constantly check the "Show unread posts since last visit. " as me

@shorena: from what I understood the new captcha is meant to replace the actual one when registering new account +/- in the first newbie post(s), so it will not have anything to do with the actual btctalkers
Since the bot didn't stop its random spam, i think implementing new captcha isn't harmful, if it will succeed to stop the bot then it is a good thing else we didn't lose anything. The actual captcha is useless anyway  

Edit:
Same

A lot are speculating that they are tying to get the post count up. I don't really buy that because that shit isn't really sustainable in the long run.
However would love to hear some alternative theories about this. I mean this looks pretty retarded and useless to me. In before the messages have a bitcoin address encoded in them that contains several hundred bitcoins.

I seriously cannot think of a reason why someone bothers to spam random words. I really wonder what's their motivation. Been reporting the ones that don't get nuked instantly. Haven't been able to hit my report limit lately tho

@Captchas:

I personally dislike them for several reasons:

#1 They are pain with tor or any other browser without javascript or hard to solve. At least for me. If I want to visit a site with Tor and its blocking me because of Tor with a captcha I just gave up and stoped visiting these pages. Its a collosal waste of my time to try and solve them. Its mostly cloud flare AFAIK.

#2 They are a pain to solve for honest users, but not for those that already invest time and money to spam the forum with nonsense. Yes, it would make the spam more expensive, but I dont think it will stop it. It might however stop new users that do not understand and do not care why the captchs had been put in place. We would essentially reduce the newbie jail without the need to post, but instead to solve captchas. The 360 seconds rule already annoy people.

@More moderation:

I dont see a reason for more staff, at least not durring NA/EU times. Most of my reports are handled quickly, esp. those regarding newbies. I think its the same for those form NA.

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Offtopic/joke section:


Im no longer in account "deleting" business.


I hear this was greatly reduced with the latest expansion. Cant confirm though as I blow my battle.net money on HotS.

Afaik funcaptcha is the one that is hard to be bypassed by bots and i remember it has advanced options that make it even harder.
Demo: https://www.funcaptcha.com/demo/
In this demo you have only 2 rounds challenges, i remember you can make more (4 or 6 if I am not wrong) then he will need ~10 sec to solve it.

Edit: maybe this could be helpful

true, i just felt that these might be a bit more time - consuming with the image load times and whatnot, and that aside, everything nowadays can be and is outsourced to cheap labor. and in that sense, captchas wouldnt be at all be a solution as long as the spammer was willing to pay for said labor. implementing this sort (or any sort) of captcha wouldnt necessarily be a solution, but it would slow down the creation of new accounts and make it more costly for the spammer though. the cost itself might be enough to deter a fair bit of spam, seeing as how the accounts arent really getting anything done except taking up a small portion of data in the forum's db.

I don't think it's possible to prevent cheap labour solving manually, because they are still humans after all, if you prevent humans from solving them, then legit users can't solve them too? 

Adding cost to spam is one of the best way to prevent spam. If it cost them $0.10 per spam post, and then that gets removed in a few seconds, it's not cost effective for them to spam any more.

But those can just be outsourced to cheap labour too, right? Personally, I would prefer filling them out with a couple of clicks than typing out those stupid deformed word ones that can take me a couple of goes sometimes.

the most difficult captcha i can think of having come across are those picture identification captchas, the ones where it says something along the lines of: 'identify all the sandwiches,' and you would choose 3 or 4 out of the 9 pictures presented. picture:


even less actually, there were a few threads in the services section before the big price hike when btc was about ~225 usd / coin offering around 15 dollars (0.07, give or take, dont care) for 10000 captchas. i do believe those were just simple 1 or 2 word text captchas though. 

I think any hurdles added to slow or stop them (or cost them more time, effort and money) are better than nothing and the crappy captcha we have at the moment and should be considered but basic ones that can be easily solved/botted themselves will be useless. Are there not any ones that are hard to bypass or possibly time-restricted to being filled in within 10-30 seconds or something to prevent cheap labour filling them out manually? As for reporting, reporting them each is preffered but if you just want to report one and state there's others that will do. Usually someone else will report them quite qucikly anyway.

Damn right!. It will just be a complete waste. I was once hired to do the grunt work years ago. The pay is really great for someone  from a 3rd world, it sure is a great motivation and mind you, I did some miracles just to please my employer.  They let me install software that for these stuff.

Question: I see that some of the bots are not nuked, but the topics are removed.

Nuke user: N/A in topic #0 by member #681850
Nuke user: N/A in topic #0 by member #681852
Remove topic: Docetists Calorimeters in topic #1280754 by member #681849
Remove topic: Sequencings Snakewood in topic #1280752 by member #681847

Doesn't it allow these bots to restart posting?
Is there something I am missing here?

Captcha can be solved by spam bots, but it cost money, because they hire someone in the 3rd world to solve it manually, about $0.10 per captcha. I think you can try to do a statistic report, you should see no one with 100 or more post count, is spamming. So it should be very effective in vastly reducing spam.

I never tried the report feature before, I just tried it, and reported 3 spam in Chinese forum. Looks like it does work well, they were removed pretty fast.

Well most of the captcha could be bypassed easily (recaptcha v1+2, solvemedia..), but afaik funcaptcha seems to be the best (+/- are you human). Implementing one of the first category is useless and if the owner of the bot insist in spamming then he could find a way, for the 2 others there is a chance to slower him tho.

Btw, i used to report the spam like this (spam bot in the bitcoin discussion section) but when I find too much i report 1 then I write something like: another 5 spam bot posts in the bitcoin discussion section, dunno if it is helpful/easier for mods to nuke it than reporting it one by one?

Personally I think adding another (better) captcha to sign-ups and when you make your first post you have to fill one in would help but not with every post and theymos seems to think they're pretty much useless anyway and I trust his judgement on that as he's a smarter guy than me and knows what he's doing when it comes to tech stuff but I don't think it would hurt adding a captcha personally.


Not a good idea. This could be abused in the same way with bots. They get nuked after one post once they're reported anyway so this will suffice.

* implement captcha for people with less than 100 post.

* Auto flag(delete) a post if 5 different people(IP) report it as spam. (though also ban the reporting account for a week, if the report was false and not in good faith)

I'm not in charge of that but...it can, yes. I do know theymos has said he doesn't want it to turn into a competition, but it's a balancing act.

I wasn't planning on adding any, just a general observation regarding what to do about them. It'll stop eventually. If not, well it's increasing mod payments, and patrollers are fairly low risk to add compared to moderators, they can only act on newbies and the actions can be easily reversed.

Can't please everyone, so someone is always going to be mad.


Sure, it's a blast. Easy to pick up and start, but difficult to master, has a high skill ceiling with stuff not really shown in most trailers, like aerials and wall action (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSjQ_9rXutg). Has a matchmaking system with ratings so you get paired up with people around your skill level generally. Compared to something like say, Starcraft 2. SC2 is considered to have a high skill ceiling, but it's artificially inflated by forcing people to do micromanagement activities like injecting larvae, managing hatchlings, things like that (APM, or actions per minute). It just ends up being frantic and kind of a drag, and makes it more difficult to focus on the fun part, the strategy.

I don't play games all that much anymore, and usually just on weekends, but when I do I play with friends so we play competitive multiplayer type stuff like Rocket League, or Heroes of the Storm. Sometimes TF2.

I'm not sure if we really need any more patrollers as bots seem to get nuked within seconds or minutes at the most. Half of the time I click on them to ban them and they're done already (though there's been a few to handle when I wake up so look into some from a direct opposite timezone to what me and most of the other mods are in if you're going to add new ones. Really don't think there would be much point adding more patrollers from European time-zones).


Was wondering what it was. I prefer the old BadBear one.


Marginally. It goes to everyone but how much you get depends on how active you are coupled with your mod rank. More mods would probaby mean others would get a little less but it would only be slight and probably not even noticable.

Wouldn't that mean less shares for the existing ones? Or does the share from ad revenue only go to Global moderators and Section moderators, not Patrollers?
Lol you like that game? Well I'm taking that as a recommendation to play it(does look interesting in dem trailers)
You know you want to...
Edit: Sho does a good job you know

It's probably not very feasible to lower it for one specific person. For an entire rank would be easier, but it'd probably be better to add more patrollers.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSpnqB-z-xs

What can I say, I like changing things up. If it were possible I probably would have changed accounts here many times by now, like I do with pretty much every other account, other forums, email, reddit, whatever. I don't like knowing that one account found could lead to a wealth of information going back many years. So I change my avatar instead and pretend it means something. At least I don't change my name.

Yeah, I miss the bear.

Anyway. I hit the 4 second limit with those bots as well. I am not sure what your limit is Your limit should be 7 or 8 seconds, not sure if it will make a difference if its lowered to 4. Maybe admins can put an even lower limit though.

"White-list" , that was the term. Thanks for the info, I'll ask BB to lower my report limit, lets see if something happens.
P.S: Noticed the change in the Bear's avatar?

We can white-list users but it's only really for shortening the time between posts/reports etc for newbs or whatever. Think it takes down your limit to 180 seconds or something so probably wont do anything for you.

Actually now that I remember a bit, I think it was you "decreasing" or doing something like "vouching for reports", for a newbie who was complaining about the report limit being too high.

Didn't know there was one but contact theymos or BadBear as they're likely the only ones that can increase it.

Wanted to make a new thread for this question but is there a way to reduce my report limit? I think I heard something about mods being able to give some "special ability" to do so.

See here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/why-do-some-random-new-accounts-create-threads-here-with-random-strange-words-1278627

And here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/hilarious-bots-posting-nonsense-whats-the-point-1278196

And no, banning IPs doesn't do anything because they just move on to another. Just ignore or report them as they get nuked within seconds/minutes.

God, since yesterday the forum is having a good amoutn of spam bots, this is annoying.
Can anything be done, except manually ban them, like trace origin IP?