Bitcoin Forum

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=mlist;sort=registered;start=399480

if you look at the new members website you will see that these are probaly bot made accounts.

they're being handled. see: https://bitcointalk.org/modlog.php

Yes, we nuke them. If you see a message from spambots, just report it.

I believe that nuking them won't do. It might remove the spam they create but spamming the forum is obviously not their goal. Deleting the account would also be problematic if it's done manually because you would be fighting bare handed against a machine. As I mentioned in a post  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=933822)I made about this, those accounts are probably made so websites can have backlinks. The forum needs to be protected from such automated account creation techniques, and I know it's hard to prevent this completely BUT it could at least become less meaningful with some small changes. Let's say that account's below Jr. Member position won't be able to use the forum's features to add links to their signature and website space. Take a look at the newest accounts (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=mlist;sort=registered;start=0;desc). Most of them have 0 or 1 posts, but almost all of them have set a website address. Turns out the forum is vulnerable and someone is abusing this vulnerability to practice his blackhat SEO techniques.

Proposal: disallow profile URLs for newbie members?

Yeah, that's it! :) Essentially a short conclusion of the above post.

Signature rules already disallow links to be in newbies' signature but AFAIK links are allowed in their profile.

I have noticed that even the last few accounts on the modlog do still have personal messages/text, signatures and profile links.

wow amazing for tons of account

but i am not receive any garbage message

They just make a single post in off-topic section, with a misleading subject and then disappear.

I guess signatures and personal infos need to be altered by hand. And not sure if only admins can do it.

+1. It should disallowed at least for newbies. Hopeffully having this bot made accounts reduced to garbage - for SEO's ends - until they reach a minimum activity of 30 would be enough to solve such issue.

Proposal : fee of 0.001 to make a new account, re-distributed every week to exisiting members that posted since the last draw.

Just report them. They usually get dealt within a few minutes if you report them. They seem to come in waves though and then die off for a while and then come back again. There's no easy way to prevent this, if we restricted personal text and signature they can still post, if we stop newbies opening a thread they'll just post in a already made topic. At the moment they get dealt wiith pretty quickly, so not a lot of people will see their personal text or signature unless you are looking through the member list or the modlog.

Google updated the page rank algorithm in late 2013/early 2014 IIRC. With that update spammed backlinks are no longer a valid form to increase the rank of a page. There even was a wave of spammers that begged popular blogs to remove their spam posts, quite funny.

Maybe the 40% of newbies account don't have bitcoin , the "unique" solution would be the newbie jail.

The only thing I could think of is having the very first posts of a newbie to be whitelisted, via the mods. Therefore, the public wouldn't see it, but the moderators would. This could become overwhelming quickly though. You want to try and keep the restrictions to a minimum. Even this system isn't that great I can see a few reasons why it would be a problem. Maybe, if a user posts a link while they are a newbie, that's the only time it will appear in the whitelist queue. Thus, eliminating normal users from censorship (there would be complaints about this no doubt) obviously, there would be workarounds for this.

I still think there's not much need as they do get handled quickly and without much fuss.  It's annoying yes.

That would just spam the newbie jail, it would be concentrated in one area rather than all over the board. It would make it easier to spot, but moderators and some users do report via the patrol page so it that case it wouldn't be much of a difference. The newbie section is quite useful for new comers that actually have a sensible question or topic to discuss. I disagreed with removing the newbie jail at first, but it was a better move and I back the idea of keeping it from returning.

Not every newbie has money before coming to the forum, they come to the forum to learn about Bitcoin, ask questions and get into discussion before they even think of purchasing any BItcoin. It might not be a lot of money, but I don't think this is the answer.

I wonder when will they stop, if they ever? It's just boosting member count with no purpose.

You must be referring to the panda/penguin updates. However, PR6 forum backlinks are still considered valuable by many. I'm not sure how the updates actually would have affected them but I'm still seeing them being sold here and there.

Though I'm not entirely against whitelisting first posts I think it's a bit overkill and this would be a hell of a lot more work for mods. I think having a captcha for the first few posts would be a better option though some bots would likely still slip through the cracks though they're manageable.

There is a captcha to create an account, how do they go over it?

And delete 0 message account every X months

And prohibit send private messages. One of them sent me spam about http://dogecoindouble.com/   >:(

Report it to mods, via the link you have at the bottom of your PM!  ;)

The report function works very well.

Already. But if they have a possibility, then others may register for the same purpose.

I agree. Like I said in my previous posts, it's not really affecting the majority of the community at the moment. They are being dealt with swiftly. All the people it is affecting only need to report the thread. The suggestion was something which would in theory work to some extent, but would be a hassle for some moderators. As long as people are reporting these bots, then there's no real concern unless they get out of hand. But, I can't see that happening as you would only need a few extra moderators to handle the workload.

I think putting any post in a queue when a newbie includes a link, could be something to consider though. There shouldn't be too many posts which have links in them and the ones that normally do are referrals, virus or these bots. I know there are valid reasons for links too, that's where the whitelist would come into effect, again I don't really know how busy moderators are so can't really assume that this would be efficient and this system wouldn't justify getting more moderators.

Xrumer and many forum posting bots has built in OCR or Optical Character Recognition which enable the bots to read the captcha.

I noticed that the current camptcha system for registering accounts is quite different than the one used before.

https://i.imgur.com/86aIrCr.jpg

It looks like this and each leter consists of a different image now. Maybe that's supposed to be more secure? I still see the same letters after several reloads though.

Can those get around the more sophisticated captchas though? Even I have trouble deciphering them sometimes. Also, what about the ones that ask you to solve a simple puzzle or question?

You would be surprised what bots/computers are capable of. Plus there is mechanical turk that pays humans faucet amounts to complete these kinds of tasks.

There are sites that pay for captcha solving, and it seems that site uses same captcha after few refreshes.

I used to own a forum (sorry, can't share the link here) that ran on phpBB and this was a huge problem. By the end of the month, I'd have hundreds of bot-created accounts which all had backlinks on their profile page. Some tried to spam the boards. Others didn't post anything. Eventually I had to change the forum settings so that all new posts would need to be approved by me and any accounts that had no posts in a week would get pruned. My forum had a CAPTCHA although it was the weak one that's supplied with phpBB by default.

My WordPress blogs had a similar problem too except it involved the comments instead. The problem died down once I implemented Akismet.


I get spam PMs sometimes from newbie accounts too. I just ignore them and they usually disappear after a while.

Also that link is down at the moment. Looks like the site owner forgot to update their contact details.


After scanning through that list, it looks like bot-created accounts outnumber genuine accounts 9-to-1. There are some genuine accounts there though. For example, these accounts look genuine:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=418467
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=418475
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=418479

Xrumer can solve recaptcha and artificial intelligent questions like 2 + 2 ?. If xrumer fails in solving the captchas it will forward to services like decaptcher which uses real people to solve captchas.

Some of the bot operators do not put the links upon registration some wait up 1 to 3 weeks.

True, but I think those accounts are genuine because each made 1 post and they don't look like they were written by bots. A few months ago, hilariousandco discovered that some bots were copying other users' posts and reposting them as their own but a quick Google search should identify any accounts that use this trick.

real madness, didnt though it would be 1 to 9  :o

wow thats a lot of bots on that page are they all banned?

That was probably a bit of an overstatement on my part. To be fair, I did a rough recount and about half had an obvious spam link in their profile. Of the rest, I'd say about half are genuine and half are bots although the fact that most new accounts have 0 posts makes it hard to guess. So that makes the proportion of bots to real accounts at around 3-to-1. Still there seems to be more bots than real users which I guess was my original point.

I'd be willing to remove bot-made accounts - I'm pretty good at detecting and cleaning up forum spam :)
@mods: PM me when you think I can be trusted and the work would be useful.

Onkel Paul

You can do that by using the "Report to moderator" button. If you only want to get rid of bots, they are normally only newbies so go over to the patrol page and report them whenever you see them. I'm sure the mods will appreciate it.

Yup I'm already doing that when I see a spammy post, but most of the obviously spammy registrations don't even post.


My offer was actually to reduce work for the mods by assisting in bot registration removal, not push work towards them :)
To me, the bots don't matter much, I don't even notice the non-posting accounts, and the spammy posts will be reported...

Onkel Paul

Where exactly is the patrol page?

For it to be visible you need to enable it in your account settings, it's under "Forum Profile Information". Check the box that says: "Show patrol link". The hyperlink is left top of the page, under "Show new replies to your posts" and above "Watchlist". Here's the link to patrol: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent;patrol

Thanks! I seem to have missed this somehow, in spite of all the months spent here.  :)

would be informative if that list would provide a summary of total moderation actions on a daily basis or weekly basis.

According to BadBear a while back they handle ~150 reports daily.

We are being showered with Viagra spam as I type.

 :D

I think that was a long time ago when he checked. I'm sure it'll be much more than that now, especially with all these bots. I've nuked probably 20-30 today alone.