Bot Protection (URL Post Restrictions)

[Evil Labrat]

Basically no matter what security mechanisms we have in place to prevent bots from registering and spamming our forums, they continue to do so.

In my experience, nearly all of our spam posts have been posts which include 1-50 URLs to other sites. My suggestion is to include the ability to limit the number of [ URL ] tags you can have in a post, but make it on a per user group basis instead of on a per forum basis.

This mechanism in conjunction with the user group promotion system would cut out essentially all spam posts that we've seen.

[BBTFPM]

It's becoming a serious problem. I've just seen some spambot software for sale that claims ........

Mutithreaded submitting: over 50 simultaneously running threads possible! (30 threads are recommended for optimal performance under 128 Kbps bandwidth)

Software can perform registration at forums (if necessary for posting messages) and automatically fill in the required fields. Upon successful registration the software posts the user-specified message and/or links.

The powerful built-in proxy-server checking script locates available proxy-servers worldwide, choosing anonymous addresses among them.

Software is able to work with lots of different types of forums and guestbooks: phpBB and PHP-Nuke with any modifications, yaBB, VBulletin, Invision Power Board, IconBoard, UltimateBB, exBB, phorum.org, wiki, different types of bulletin boards and even custom-written code.

Attention: unique feature

[Guest]

likely yes.

all spam posts also have the smilie post icon (1st element of the post icons), so you could filter on that as well.

it likely already help a great deal if we could delete posts from within the "view new posts" link so we can save ourselves some clicks :)

[dereisbaer]

there is a way to get rid of the robots. if you use custom profile fields the robot is always filling them in the same way. you just filter the robots who fill in the same stuff. check it out ;)

[Strange_Will]

Thing is spam bot software is UBER easy to write (image reading is the only part that could be considered hard in the least... and is probably a library...), you make a restriction, they'll program it with max - 1. :P

[cojo]

Instead of limiting the number of URLs, how about giving the option to remove or hide them in posts based on user group. I've read that some using this approach have had good success against spammers. Initially, they saw a slight increase in posts from each. After seeing their links won't display, the same spammers reportedly moved on and didn't return.