What's up with all the spam posts?
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How do those accounts bypass the 3 posts rule? Some of them have more than three in a row.
Anyway, it doesn't solve the problem anyway as there dozens of such accounts. It seems to me that making an account is to easy. I have never seen such massive bot attacks on any forum I've ever used. So there has to be a way to prevent them.
Why wouldn't solving a captcha at registration work? Are there ways for bots to bypass that as well?
I made a new account a few minutes ago to test it, and you just have to put in a username and password. You already have an account then. In the next step you have to submit an email address, but it serves no purpose. I just submitted donald.duck@whatthehell.com. In other forums a link is sent to your email to confirm it's really you. Until you click the link in the email, you account isn't active. Wouldn't that prevent the bot attacks?
However, with the new account I get the message that there is a queue system and a mod has to unlock the post, so I don't get how these spam posts happen anyway.
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@brad said in What's up with all the spam posts?:
or get 2 "reputation" points (still not quite sure what those are).
Maybe they're scripting upvotes. The email addresses are throwaways so we just disable this.
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@Korven said in What's up with all the spam posts?:
Help! The bots are taking over
@ThinPickingOnly 'cyberattack' consultancy from Charlie can save us.
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I have one observation. But first, thanks to everyone for continuing to fight the good fight, The spam bots seem to keep trickling into the forum.
I noticed a large number of new users who were banning yesterday and another large number of new users who were banned today. Sandwiched between these 2 groups are several new users who have evaded banishment.
https://bioenergetic.forum/user/boyope8926
https://bioenergetic.forum/user/laradutta
https://bioenergetic.forum/user/lordbantu
https://bioenergetic.forum/user/kashimia
https://bioenergetic.forum/user/jilculoaya
https://bioenergetic.forum/user/telava
https://bioenergetic.forum/user/judithgatson
https://bioenergetic.forum/user/khushboopatil444
https://bioenergetic.forum/user/uniassignment
https://bioenergetic.forum/user/invoicetempleapp
https://bioenergetic.forum/user/kekimod875Could these users be some sort of Trojan horse?
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'User' veyewo joined 21 minutes ago has 0 reputation and made 8 spam posts in a row. https://bioenergetic.forum/user/veyewo
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Not sure what exactly happened. All the accounts that made posts verified their email that's why they were able to post. unfortunately now the post queue is 900 posts long with all the posts the bots made. I contacted Brad about the problem.
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@Kilgore said in What's up with all the spam posts?:
All the accounts that made posts verified their email that's why they were able to post.
They don't need to for the first 3 posts. Some of the ones going over 3 posts had junk TLDs so I doubt they could verify. They probably scripted 2 upvotes with other accounts to bypass the limit.
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@Luke said in What's up with all the spam posts?:
'User' veyewo joined 21 minutes ago has 0 reputation and made 8 spam posts in a row. https://bioenergetic.forum/user/veyewo
Oh I missed that. I guess it's so over if they're verifying 'real' email addresses.
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This might not be possible, or even a good idea, but what if new users have to add a credit card upon registration? And they are charged like 0$ or 0.01$.
This would fix the problem, no?
I thought about adding a bunch of questions like "How much milk should one drink per day?" and have someone manually review every new user but that would become extremely tedious (especially if all new users are bots).
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I've taken the following steps:
- Required new signups to receive administrative approval
- Increased the amount of upvotes/reputation you need to have un-reviewed posts.
That should halt the botswarm momentum for now. Hopefully the locusts lose interest and move on to greener pastures. @ThinPicking @Kilgore Thank you both for all of your help during this time.
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@brad Thanks that should work. Could you clean up the post queue? When I go to Bell > Post awaiting review I get one post loaded up. I reject that then a page with like 50 posts loads up. But there I am not allowed to reject/accept posts "You do not have enough privileges for this action.". Not one by one or in bulk.
