Interlopers.net Forum - Half-Life 2 News & Tutorials

Why has there been so many spam bots lately? Don't we have some sort of feature that makes it very difficult for automated bots to register an account? Maybe we need a new system, there are plenty on the phpbb home page.

How about on the sign-ups page make people anwser basic Source Engine Game questions like 'Dr. Breen lives in what building?' or 'The Team Fortress 2 Heavy is from what country?'

What if he is a CSS modder has never played or heard of any other Source games...

Neat idea, but I am not too sure about that. Cause, I don't even know what country the Heavy is from... Russia?

He is from Nigeria.

How about a CAPTHCA?

That worked out for my friends forum (PHPBB)
Forgot, does Interlopers already have one?

Well theoretically bots can try and guess, but they have very little chance of getting through one.

spambots can easily register through any captha through a pretty clever workaround. Quite simply, bot loads page with captha, copies captha image. Bot is linked to other site, eg. pornsite, where it displays the captha image. Human trying to log into the pornsite enters the captha code. Bot then enters that captha code into interlopers and verifies its correctness. Result: 1) bot logged into interlopers succesfully. 2) porn site has free captcha security.

Not sure at what scale this is currently applied, but ive heard its substantial.

That banks that there is a human at the right time?

So we just drop in a timeout so you can only take, say 10-20 mins registering.

Plague wrote:That banks that there is a human at the right time?

So we just drop in a timeout so you can only take, say 10-20 mins registering.

the bot waits for the user at the porn site to log into interlopers, of course.

Seems like we are giving too much credit to these spam bots.

So, what do we do about it? The one forum I go to has a feature where you have to have a minimum of three posts to be able to post links, seems to work well most the time.

Did we confirm Interlopers has a CAPTHCA?

As I brought up before, My friend and I had quite an issue with bots till we set one up.
It would at least take care of the majority, the smart-bots would just have to be done with the good ol' fashion way.

interlopers has a custom captcha. Works much better than any phpbb delivers, because its custom. Any captcha delivered by phpbb is primary target for bot scripters.

Well it is not working better then the phpbb one we use....

But It never seemed too bad to me anyways, just a spam bot every now and then.

Plague wrote:Well it is not working better then the phpbb one we use....

But It never seemed too bad to me anyways, just a spam bot every now and then.

ah, but bots target interlopers.net more often than your crappy forum of course. The amount of bots successfully registering has lowered since we made the custom captcha, so we know for a fact its working better.