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There are people who register a bogus free email address, register for a specific list of forums, post an ad (Ctrl-V), and disappear for a little bit only to return later on a different account with a different email address. They're playing with search engine spiders more than actually expecting traffic from a specific forum.As for why they aren't bots...
- Their IPs are not usually proxies, which are common for bots and spiders.
- Bots would generally either flood us or post on a specific interval. Except for a few cases the accounts used to spam only post one thread and then just leave altogether. The few who actually posted more than once posted at a random interval. We've had this all the way back to 2003, just not as common as right now.
- The email addresses that I checked were all valid.
- A lot of these are coming from places that have a reputation for spamming on a wide variety of sites. A bot is not intelligent enough to handle topsites, multiple types of forum software, shoutboxes, and other features along those lines. They would generally need to be designed for a specific type or version of whatever media they're spamming on.
- I've received a few validation requests for gallery images from accounts that would be considered "bots" by our members. There aren't any bots that I know of that can interact with our portal, the gallery software, and the forum software during the same period of activity. A bot would also generally do the same thing every time, and for the common ads, I only received one submission (ever). Seems unpredictable.
- I'm not going to say where, but we've been receiving a lot of hits from places that don't speak English. They are very likely tied to the spamming because there is little other reason for them to be here. As such, they may realistically not know English, and are simply posting a translated message which may result in a perception of uniformity on our side.
- Lastly, we have anti-bot protection for registration. For quite a while we've implemented the registration code validation, which requires someone to physically read an image instead of read the code on a page. The only feasible way for a bot to pass through this is if a person physically intervenes, in which case it would be easier to simply post ads by hand if an account is only here to post one message. If there were a way to exploit it, I'm sure it would be known, and InvisionPower would release a suitable patch to fix it.
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So please, let's at least consider them humans. It's not really important because they may as well be bots in the sense that they'll probably never look at replies, but I've been receiving a lot of PMs about "bots" and there is no quick fix for what we have. I really appreciate the support and concern, and if you find something that needs to be removed along these lines, please contact a moderator.
Also, let's not blow it out of proportion, the ads are fairly localized and are merely an eye-sore in most cases. We're banning IPs and working out solutions, but for the time being all we can do is clean the threads out as we see them.
MultiQuote
Posted 16 December 2006 - 11:08 PM
Posted 17 December 2006 - 09:10 AM
