Blocking the bots

[cpr]

I've noticed were getting quite a few bots coming on and spamming with tons of threads at silly o clock in the morning at the moment. Do we have any way of weeding these out at registration, such as a captcha screen or answer a simple question part? Quite a few sites/forums do this now, is it something we should look into to stop these?

Its pretty tough at this time of the morning to read the forum if you use the 'New Posts' function, as 90% of the threads are spam

 

[James]

We do all the above, but if the bot is a human there's nothing much we can do to block them.

I'd suggest to everyone that as soon as you see a spam post/thread, please report it. There's usually a mod around most hours of the day and it can then be taken care of fairly quickly.

 

[Pratters]

How about requiring to make at least one post in the forum to be able to make a new thread?

 

[GIMH]

Wouldn't stop them, they'd only need to spam one existing thread and then open season

 

[OverratedSanity]

Restricting new posters from making threads will do nothing. The bots will just spam existing threads, which would arguably be worse.

Instead, can't we have it like if you have less than 50 posts, a thread you start will have to go through moderation before it's published on the forum. James himself said that mods are usually around most hours of the day, so the sensible threads won't have to wait too long to get published.

 

[Pratters]

Restricting new posters from making threads will do nothing. The bots will just spam existing threads, which would arguably be worse.

Instead, can't we have it like if you have less than 50 posts, a thread you start will have to go through moderation before it's published on the forum. James himself said that mods are usually around most hours of the day, so the sensible threads won't have to wait too long to get published.

This is not a bad idea at all.

 

[sledger]

Should just sue them for defamation.

 

[cpr]

This morning I came on at 6am, there were 3 pages of threads about 2 hours old from bots, so either mods aren't about as much as we think, or they don't take their job seriously enough

 

[Howe_zat]

Should just sue them for defamation.

You don't fear their black magic?

 

[sledger]

You don't fear their black magic?

Nah if they come after me I'll just run them over.

 

[Pratters]

Should just sue them for defamation.

Nah if they come after me I'll just run them over.

Leave the jokes to Marc buddy.

 

[sledger]

Leave the jokes to Marc buddy.