How to stop the bots

[WiredIncorrectly]

You need to put recaptcha on signup/login, and stop new members from posting until their first few posts have been vetted. I don't mind doing some post vetting. They're robots, and robots don't do very well with recaptcha. Those that do will have their posts vetted/ghosted.

[NoraB]

Does my head in does this!

[WiredIncorrectly]

Does my head in does this!

Same Nora. Being a web developer myself I've had to deal with this numerous times. One time they were spamming the life out of my comments section on my blogs.

If admin doesn't mind setting up a few mods that only have access to vetting new posts I'll gladly help out. I'm at my PC a lot anyway.

[nomorepanic]

recaptcha is already on.

If we moderate first posts it is a lot of extra work and it stops overnight visitors from posting until we are around to do it.

We did this before and it was just more work for the admins.

[WiredIncorrectly]

I haven't seen recaptcha on login, but that's not the issue really. If the bot can get past recaptcha then that solution is pointless. Sadly there are numerous sweatshops in India and China where people sit there completing them for the bots. It's something like a penny per captcha or something like that. Google "death by captcha" ... that's the API the bots use.

Circumventing this problem without manually checking posts is most definitely possible.

How about ensuring new users can't post links until they've surpassed say ... 20 posts? Rate limit how many posts a new user can make in a given space of time?

I could write a vBulletin plugin for this easily. It would even detect URL's that are masked such as "somewebsite (dot) com" etc.

You could go the extra mile and use AI. What I would do is take every post on this forum to build a training set for an AI model. The AI model would then work out whether or not a new users post needs to be moderated or not. AI sounds like a big scary word it's not. It will be looking for "is the post content similar to other posts made in OCD (or any other subfoum new user is posting in)".

There's many ways to skin this cat. Do you have hidden form fields in your forms that bots would fill out, but a human wouldn't (because it's invisible to the user)? You can literally put a form field on there that says "If you are NOT a robot leave this field black". Any account that fills that in needs post moderation. Ghost it, so the spammer/bot doesn't notice. It's post will go through and be visible to them only, but in reality it's moderated/deleted. This is actually how Facebook does their ghost posting.

How badly do you want to solve this problem he he?

[whispershadow]

Is recaptcha the tickbox thing saying "i'm not a robot?

sorry i'm unsure

[nomorepanic]

recaptcha is on registration not login.

I don't understand most of what you are saying wired

[ankietyjoe]

The easiest and most transparent solution may be to limit new users to posting on no more than 3 separate threads per day. It should be easier to delete them without them smothering the forums then.

[nomorepanic]

I wouldn't know how to do that Joe.

[ankietyjoe]

Maybe Wired can help.