What the heck is up with these bots?

[Merk]

Guys, lolololololololol why are there like a billion bots shit posting all over our beautiful forum all of a sudden?

Don't get me wrong, I like how goofy the situation is, but I'm curious as to how this shit even happens.

[Ho]

It's been like 6 bots...just each of them has been posting many messages.

I guess they finally figured out our super secure quiz about what the abbreviation for Dance Dance Revolution is. It's worked pretty well (better than the phpBB CAPTCHA) for years.

I went ahead and switched us over to Google reCAPTCHA to see how well that does. I think I've cleaned up all the trash in the meantime.

[Ho]

I guess it was actually more like a dozen or 20 bots (today). It's just that only about 6 of them were able to or had started posting. I am nuking them all with extreme prejudice.

[Amp Divorax]

Thank goodness. Anymore russian bots and I'm starting a feedback thread asking for a built in Russian Translator.

[Ho]

I think our memberlist shrank by a whole page today.

But I guess it grew by that much today, so I've really just restored the balance.

[Merk]

Thanks for taking care of those bots again, those things are ridiculous!

[Ho]

I had been doing it, but I think MonMotha has been on it this past week or so.

I have to say I'm kind of disappointed with re:captcha 2. Either that, or it would be even more ridiculously bad here without it?

[MonMotha]

I'm pretty sure re:captcha is just a tool for Google to automate and train their "machine vision" systems at this point. I have my doubts as to how effective of a CAPTCHA it really is.

[Potter]

it's super ghetto, but back when I was running a phpbb forum, I used code similar to this to sloppily password protect the ucp.php file (that gets used for registration) https://stackoverflow.com/a/45869294

Then make the display text "just enter xxpasswordxx" humans can get past it in a couple seconds but bots are too stupid to realize what's going on and don't even recognize the page, went from 3 or 4 bot signups a day to 0 in 3 years

downside: ucp.php is also used for checking PMs and moderator stuff, so you'd have to quickly enter the pass when viewing those too, but meh

[Merk]

Meh, my PM inbox is full anyway so I am all for this ucp.php file

[Merk]

At least I know what ISO 4001 is now -- these effing bots are crazy!

[Ho]

LOL! The signature of one of the bots...

captchabot.png (2.96 KiB) Viewed 65759 times

[Merk]

Ah shit I had to turn off signatures since that one dude had that giant "RAPE" text in flashing rainbow colors and lord knows in TYOOL 2018 if someone looking to be victimized saw that I'd be immediately canned and jailed with no due process.

[Merk]

Should we just do some sort of manual process to accept new members? These bots are ridic

[MonMotha]

I went ahead and changed the settings to require admin approval. I guess Ho can start getting some emails.

Re-captcha is clearly broken. I'm convinced it just gets kept around because Google uses it to train their machine vision systems. I don't think it's particularly effective as a CAPTCHA anymore.