This spambot issue has become really out of hand.

[Treylina]

I hate to say this, but you guys might as well disable registering for this forum until this issue is fixed. I've got like two spambot mails, and several spambot posts over the forum have been appearing over the months. I'm certain you mods/admins are aware of this issue and are probably sick of deleting those kind of posts already, but it seems like nothing is actually being done to prevent it. I think this has been happening over several forums with a similar anti-spambot system (forgot what it was called) that seems to have become exploited though. I bet there have been more spambots registering here than real people over this time...

[Jgke]

Unfortunatively, even systems like captchas might not work for this... There might someone typing those for the bots which use them to log in to the system.

[Obi1mcd]

I agree wholeheartedly. Surely there's some sort of system that could be implemented to help the situation. I don't quite know wether disabling registrations is the best option, however.

[Stijn]

If you're getting <em>e-mails</em> from spambots, there's little we can do to prevent that, except recommending you not to publish your e-mail address online.

As for registrations, that's a problem and at this point the only semi-viable solution would be to have everyone who wants to register send me or another admin a message, as we'd disable the registration form. I say "semi-viable" because it's very cumbersome for both the admins (who are all kind of busy with other things, at least I very much am lately) and the users.

As an aside, "surely something can be done about this" is easy to say but it is in fact not that simple to come up with a solution that blocks spambots while not hindering actual users.

[Jgke]

One thing that could be done would be adding an anti-spambot moderator army, but that wouldn't really remove the problem :(

[Sean]

I think you should get someone to write a bot to monitor newly registered users for an extraordinary amount of PMs sent soon after registering. Also keep a bot out to look for key terms such as cybers--, p-rn, f--k, pe--s enlargement, and other s-x relate terms. Have them flagged then checked by admins.

[WhiteBlaster]

I agree with Sean. Also add di-k, I got a PM from a spambot with that. Tip: to control spam on PMs, monitor PMs sent to many (5?) people. It may work.

[Stijn]

Please don't censor yourselves, it makes your messages hard to read.

[Stijn]

Okay, so there's a few issues here that make this problem harder to tackle than simply using your suggestions of "just make a script that fixes it":


JCF runs on vBulletin, which is a product not made by the JCF staff, and hence is a lot harder to write any antispam script for than for Jazz2Online itself, which was completely coded by the J2O staff - not to mention that writing an actually effective antispam script is not all that easy.
We don't really have a lot of time.
Right now new registrations have to be approved manually before they can post on the forums. This fixes the problem of spambots on the forum themselves (as in, posting in threads and the like) but because of item 2 on this list, there is an absolutely gigantic backlog of users to be approved and genuine new users are caught in this backlog as well.
An alternative would be having new users PM an admin so they can then approve the user, so not all new users have to be checked manually. This would require us to allow unapproved users to send PMs (they are allowed to do so at the moment). That is however also the reason you're getting spam PMs in the first place. So there's no really easy solution out of this situation, except for writing a custom script, but see point 1 and 2 for why that's problematic as well.


There might be a vBulleting plugin that can help but this, but well... 2

[Jgke]

#2 is not effective on me, and I hate the spam!

[Stijn]

#2 is not effective on me, and I hate the spam!
I'd be more than willing to take on the problem if you in turn take my university coursework on you :)

[Jgke]

I could do them, but you should expect failing in all things ;)

[CrimiClown]

This is maybe a bit of a shot in the dark, but spambots usually don't know simple things like "What is the first battle level?" or "What is the filename of the .exe for running the game Jazz Jackrabbit?" Maybe such a question could be added before you can register, just like on the D3 website for commenting on news posts.

[cooba]

Seconding Crimi, that's a heaps better solution than any captcha.

[Jgke]

That would also keep unwanted people out of here ;)
So, we need to think good questions!

[Obi1mcd]

Before we think of questions, though, is this reasonably easy to incorporate?

[Stijn]

It's a way better suggestion than "just make a script", at least :)

I'm at my parents' place at the moment, will see whether that's possible to implement when I get back home.

[Sean]

<s>Mommy's boy</s> You should definitely implement that, Stijn. Possibly also with the captcha.

[Stijn]

I've added a verification question (instead of a CAPTCHA) which should be easy to answer for people who know about the Jazz Jackrabbit series, let's see if it works...

[TechnoPauluz]

Great work Ill gonna test it.

For now here's an ad:

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EDIT:
It worked flawless, the anwser system! Every Jazz fan knows the red rabbit of the family is Lori!

O yes, I only got 2 spam pm's because I pm'ed back that I sell better stuff for better prices ;)

[Sean]

FIREFOX FTW!!!!!1111!!!11!1! Noob fail.

[CrimiClown]

My work here is done...