bot made accounts

[DonQuijote]

Proposal: disallow profile URLs for newbie members?

And delete 0 message account every X months

[xandry]

Proposal: disallow profile URLs for newbie members?

And delete 0 message account every X months

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

[Grand_Voyageur]

Proposal: disallow profile URLs for newbie members?

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! 

[picolo]

Proposal: disallow profile URLs for newbie members?

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.

[xandry]

Proposal: disallow profile URLs for newbie members?

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! 

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

[Welsh]

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.

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.

[cyrusb]

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

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

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

[alani123]

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.



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.

[hilariousandco]

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

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

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

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?

[ScryptAsic]

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

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

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

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.

[SirChiko]

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

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

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

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?

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

[Bizmark13]

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.

Proposal: disallow profile URLs for newbie members?

And delete 0 message account every X months

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

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.

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 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. 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.

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

[cyrusb]

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

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

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

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?

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.

[cyrusb]

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.

Proposal: disallow profile URLs for newbie members?

And delete 0 message account every X months

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

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.

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 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. 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.

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

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

[Bizmark13]

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.

Proposal: disallow profile URLs for newbie members?

And delete 0 message account every X months

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

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.

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 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. 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.

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

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.

[criptix]

real madness, didnt though it would be 1 to 9 

[SureLockLoans]

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

[Bizmark13]

real madness, didnt though it would be 1 to 9 

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.

[OnkelPaul]

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

[Welsh]

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.