The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Are you asking how do we know that YOU are not a bot?

Several things nearly all the bots that I deleted have in common:

1. Zero Posts
2. Websites that are clearly spamming
3. Failure to change the phpbbs skin to "songfight" during registration

fluffy wrote:Heuristics.

Yeah, I'll tell you who's a bot. c3p0, r2d2, Crow, Tom Servo, I know all the bots.
-bill

Albatross wrote:Today we got one from a bestiality site. That's just wrong.

No, that's Klownhole.

There's a, uh, not quite PG new member.

Funny, that's the same person who was just spamming MY forum. I guess they found one from the other. Odd.

Bjam wrote:There's a, uh, not quite PG new member.

Most people aren't that aware of new members joining, unless they post. Well, or unless someone posts for them.

Hint: PM when you find something particularly offensive, and I will be glad to take care of it.

We've reached 40 2Rules members! They must love Songfight in Mongolia.

i'm refusing to post this in the troll thread in monkey business.

i am not seeing a way to ignore a particular user on this system. does that ability exist? i was highly annoyed to find i had received a spam PM from user "oust the mods" and i would like a way to assure this will not happen again. anybody?

TIA

Looks like an influx of SPAM-based members over the past few days...delete those bitches...? Those bastards

THERE ARE NO BOTS ON THIS MESSAGE BOARD
ALL BOTS ARE HERESY
HERESY WILL BE ELIMINATED

...So... I know I'm flogging ye olde dead stallion here, I know... but I'd like to timidly propose once again that perhaps it's time to upgrade to a PHPBB that has more effective bot blockin'? These f@#$ers are getting out of control!

(Although I HAVE met a bevy of sexy, bored housewifes and made a ton of money in lucrative investment schemes as a result!)

Feel free to find such a "newer version." Ppbb has always had horrible spam control, but spam control is a hard thing to do for a forum. Most spam I see these days is posted by hand.

fine. i admit it. i'm a bot. my songs are all randomly generated.

fluffy wrote:Most spam I see these days is posted by hand.

So how difficult is it to delete stuff by hand? I'd volunteer to help out but it sounds like a lot of work, and I have this rule where I only volunteer to do the really easy things.

Or maybe phpbb ain't the way to go? I've been following a couple of boards that use other software, are much larger than SF and never seem to have any spam problems. Granted, I have no real experience with this, which is why I'm making suggestions about it on an internet bulletin board.

If therre was a phpBB mod that allowed an admin to delete a threat with one click, and ban a user and his IP with one click, that would make keeping up with the bots a lot easier. Or a "spammer" button that does both-- gets rid of all threads started by a user, and bans his IP and username.

Sounds like a scorched earth kind of thing I know, but since stopping them from registering and posting seems to be basically impossible, it would make it easier to handle their shit once it gets through the automated filters.

As far as I can see there is no such mod for phpBB. Perhaps fluffy can build one for us.

JB

jb wrote:If therre was a phpBB mod that allowed an admin to delete a threat with one click

JB, have you seen this? http://starfoxtj.phpbbhelp.org/phpBB/toolkit/

There are also a few anti-spam hacks and mods for phpBB, but I think they all require a newer version of the software: http://www.phpbbhacks.com/category/10


If you don't mind messing with a little code, here are some tricks that might help:

Require javascript in the user's browser, since most bots don't support it: http://www.tfbw.com/archives/20

Remove the URL and signature fields from the signup form, and reject any submission that still provides those values as it must be an automated submission: http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=396855

Add the "noindex,nofollow" meta tag: http://boonedocks.net/mike/archives/70- ... art-2.html

Stop non-validated users from showing up: http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=239128

Add a hidden form field to the signup form, and reject submissions that don't provide the field: http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.ph ... 02#1259171

Set up a CRON job to delete users who don't activitate right away: http://boonedocks.net/mike/archives/124 ... mbers.html

I think this last one would nail ALL the spam we've gotten so far. Look at user "Poted42", which registered 9 days ago and only posted its first spam today.

bzl wrote:I've been following a couple of boards that use other software, are much larger than SF and never seem to have any spam problems.

Most of the larger communities have a few moderators. The easiest low-tech way to prevent spam (and it's 100% effective) is to manually approve all user registrations. I don't think we're there yet, though

Every anti-spam measure has its strengths and weaknesses. Disallowing Google from indexing it is a definite double-edged sword, and it doesn't really help that much anyway since the spammers seem to keep their own registry of boards to begin with. Disallowing non-Javascript browsers is a can of worms that nobody should even CONSIDER.

Also songfight.net runs the latest version of phpBB2.

Also I think JB just didn't realize that the little "x" button at the bottom of every thread nukes the whole thread regardless of whether it's been replied to.

I personally get a lot of spam on my own forum and I'm always experimenting with techniques to deal with it and it's just a total arms race. As soon as any one technique gets widespread adoption, the spammers just find something else. The only way to truly stop spam is to shut down all legitimate communication. Spammers actually have large pools of resources where they pay starving college students (like Jenhere, whose legacy lives on with the whole 'A NEW PLAYER' thing) and people in third-world countries to actually personally register on a board, read a thread, and post a specific reply to it which is vaguely on-topic and then with various links hidden in the punctuation and the user profile and so on, whether or not the board adds rel="nofollow" to outgoing links or whatever. I have friends who have posted very personal weblog posts (like about their favorite pet dying or their grandmother being sick) only to get posts from spammers with a message like, "I am sorry to hear about your loss. http://PORN-SEX-BLOWJOB.INFO"

Spammers are both stupid and extremely determined. (By stupid I don't mean that the people causing the spam to happen are stupid, but that they make use of very stupid resources which don't discriminate between a board which makes their spamming worthwhile and one which doesn't.)

No matter HOW HARD YOU TRY to get rid of automated techniques, you won't stop spammers, because they don't USE automated techniques anymore. Sure, there are things you can key on to stop them (like a lot of them convolute their referrer strings in specific ways which are easy to detect) but with everything you do to stop a spammer you run the risk of also messing up legitimate traffic, and at the same time it's so very trivial for them to change their tactic.

Spammers have HUGE numbers. Think of them as several thousand (at least!) very determined Denyers.

By the way, I wrote a mod a long time ago to disable robots from showing up in the memberlist, and was largely ignored by the phpBB community. Now that it's a huge problem there have been about a dozen different solutions to it, which just shows that phpBB modders have an annoying tendency to not look to see if other people have already solved a problem. If you patch your board with every little thing which comes out you end up with a hundred instances of the same thing. Just applying patches willy-nilly is a horrible idea.

fluffy wrote:The only way to truly stop spam is to shut down all legitimate communication.

Or moderate more, especially on a low-traffic board like this.

fluffy wrote:No matter HOW HARD YOU TRY to get rid of automated techniques, you won't stop spammers, because they don't USE automated techniques anymore.

It kinda reads like you're saying it's futile to try.

Just because the problem can't be solved outright doesn't mean it's pointless to ameliorate it a little. Accepting that it's not possible to stop spammers, you've basically got two choices: do something, or do nothing. Only one of those choices results in less spam.

fluffy wrote:Think of them as several thousand (at least!) very determined Denyers.

Heh.

The little X will help, thanks for pointing it out. I'd still like a "ban and clean" for a user that bans the username and IP and destroys all threads and posts made by a user. A DESTROY USER button.

deshead wrote:

fluffy wrote:The only way to truly stop spam is to shut down all legitimate communication.

Or moderate more, especially on a low-traffic board like this.

Well, yeah, more moderators would definitely help. But moderation leads to another path which some people object to on an open community since it inherently leads to a subjective representation of what is acceptable objective. or whatever the hell people like OTM are saying this week.

I don't like mods in general, but if we had people in, say, a 'spam patrol' role that'd be a lot better.

fluffy wrote:No matter HOW HARD YOU TRY to get rid of automated techniques, you won't stop spammers, because they don't USE automated techniques anymore.

It kinda reads like you're saying it's futile to try.

I'm saying that there is no silver bullet and that people who have "the answer" are smoking crack. None of the things you mentioned or linked to, aside from more moderators, are an actual reasonable solution which doesn't cause other problems.

Just because the problem can't be solved outright doesn't mean it's pointless to ameliorate it a little. Accepting that it's not possible to stop spammers, you've basically got two choices: do something, or do nothing. Only one of those choices results in less spam.

Doing something is good. Doing whatever you can think of because it seems like a good idea at the time is not. Consideration must be paid to side effects.

fluffy wrote: I don't like mods in general, but if we had people in, say, a 'spam patrol' role that'd be a lot better.

Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-duh-duh-nuh... Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh... Who you gonna call...

Spambusters.