Topic: Spam

[Matthew]

I don't know... ok, I'll bite... why would it?

It wouldn't. Which means it's not a human.

[-<WillyP>-]

Sorry, guess I'm not following your logic. You suggested a special thread as a solution to spam now you say it won't work?

[karx-elf-erx]

Willy,

it rather looks like you cannot properly follow a few simple posts following each other. A bot wouldn't post in a special thread to prove it's not a bot. That way a bot intrusion prevention system would work.

[-<WillyP>-]

Right, I got that. But what I am saying is that many of the bot's are human assisted. The bots do what they can and when they get stopped they send a flag to a que where a human may take over. Once the blockage is bypassed the human sends it to another que for the bot to take over again. If the spammers gave up so easily as posting in a specific forum there would be no spam. Not many forums still use the specific thread form of anti spam anymore. Bots can usualy capable of trying different boards to find which one they can post in.

ReCaptcha and Bad Behavior are out for SMF2, I'll install them once we convert. Bad Behavior works by analyzing the http request and other things before a bot script even has access. Then compares to a database of known spammers, scripts and various data. It determine whether a bot or human spammer is likely and may ban or flag a visitor based on that. I'm told there is a simple method for someone caught with a false positive to prove human but I haven't seen it yet. I do know since installing BB and ReCaptcha on my Nucleus powered sites I have had zero spam.

Anyway my comment to Matt was in regards his first recommending a posting trap, then a few posts later saying it would not work against human or human/bot spammers... which are the real problem.

[Matthew]

No, I'm using the fact that it DOES work as evidence that they are NOT, as you assume, humans or human-assisted bots, but rather pure bots.

And I know they work as I have used incredibly simple bot traps to great effect before on even simple invisionfree forums running pitifully outdated software that doesn't even use CATCHPA.

[karx-elf-erx]

Ah, I see. Obviously your post could easily be misunderstood.