Suggestion to prevent BOTS and Sockpuppet from leeching the forum's PR

[alani123]

As many users (and most likely moderators) have noticed, there's a flood of posts that look identical, all from 0 post accounts.

They're posting links trying to advertise irrelevant services etc. My best guess is that someone has created a bot or has some sort of automated post mechanism in use. Although those posts keep getting deleted shortly after they're posted by the mods, whoever is behind it keeps coming back posting links...

My best guess is that this individual is trying to boost the SEO rank of websites he's advertising. bitcointalk has a pagerank (PR) of 6, backlinks on PR 6 pages can be quite costly if provided as a service. Even if those backlinks are forum signatures. As a result, forums might get spammed by people trying to improve SEO or sell backlinks.

So what could be done to prevent a big forum as bitcointalk from being spammed from people with such intentions? I think it's as simple as not allowing low rank accounts to post links. What do you think?

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[hilariousandco]

Yeah, I've nuked a lot of them today. Sometimes links are auto-removed but only when they're 'suspicious' but I'm not sure disallowing all the urls from newbs would really be a solution as the bots will still post. I think some sort of better captcha system would be a better idea though. Maybe you have to answer a captcha for the first few posts or something.

[Welsh]

I've seen a lot of referral links being posted recently and they normally have the same referable url. Also, accounts just randomly posting a thread and going offline without any follow up questions or answers. I've also seen the links to different websites flying around and with the recent Ponzi outbreak there's been a lot of them spreading their links through alt accounts.

Luckily, they don't do much harm as they normally dealt as soon as I report them, probably the longest one I've seen is an hour, much longer if the person is not a Newbie though because, it requires higher end staff.

It's not easy to prevent sock puppets, I used to think there could be a system put into place but, was proven wrong. Disallowing links wouldn't have much of a effect to be honest, they would just post no quality posts just to reach the limit and then spam their links. Just adding more chaos for the mods to deal with. Doing that would be easily achievable, an example would be programming a bot just to post a previous post in the same thread could go unnoticed for awhile unless you have keen eyes. They could, just target the "what song are you listening to right now" and that would probably go unnoticed. So, even restricting the links to rank, isn't going to stop those persistent bastards.

[cyrusb]

There are probably using xrumer bots. xrumer can solved the hardest captcha even recaptcha even artificial intelligence captcha like 2+2 . It uses multiple ips, even you banned the ip it will be back with multiple ips.