Forums → News and Feedback → Any way to prevent Spambots?

Not promoting anything, but I've seen another forum, with problems just like this (LOTS of spambots). Requiring reCAPTCHA when making a thread helped them a lot.

We do have some new measures in place, though I can't really comment on them for security reasons. I can say there has been a steady decrease in the number of spambots getting through. It may not feel that way to you guys sometimes, and it's certainly frustrating for all of us.

One of the biggest problems is that many of the spambots aren't actually bots. There are real people behind many of the posts that get through, and these are extremely difficult to combat.

But we have an excellent team of administrators who are not only incredibly intelligent but also very clever and innovative problem solvers. And we moderators will continue to delete the spam posts as soon as we see them.

And, as frustrating as it is, there's something else to keep in mind. The typical spam post has an average life expectancy of something like 5 minutes - if that. So please keep in mind that we're all working very hard to keep our forums neat and tidy and to keep the bad guys out.

The grammar used in some of the spam threads astounds me, truly awful to read.

One of the biggest problems is that many of the spambots aren't actually bots. There are real people behind many of the posts that get through, and these are extremely difficult to combat.

There are a few simple measures that might help:
1 Only an adspammer would be expected to make three or more new threads in direct succession. If you can cap a user's thread creation at ~3/hour, it should eliminate the annoying page-full-of-Indian-love-guru-ads that we sometimes get.
2 Immediately flag any thread with a phone number or several repeated non-alphaneumerics (like [([text])], text***text, or text//text//text) in the title. Even if not an ad, it's probably going to be spam.
3 Prevent the creation of any thread which has the same title and/or OP as another thread that's less than a week old. Because people sometimes do this for non-spam reasons, it might help to add a notification such as "There is already a thread on this subject. If the other thread was locked, please contact a moderator instead of making a duplicate."

I just want to say the moderators kick serious butt in this area. Much respect for their hard work!

So please keep in mind that we're all working very hard to keep our forums neat and tidy and to keep the bad guys out.

I just want to say the moderators kick serious butt in this area. Much respect for their hard work!

I know. This was not meant to be disrespectful in any way (I apologise if it came across like it). Quite the opposite in fact, I want to congratulate all of you for the great work you do not only in taking down spam, but also in being available for every user, for always being polite (regardless of the question and the way it is phrased), and for (no better term to describe it) being great at Moderating! So thanks.

We do have some new measures in place, though I can't really comment on them for security reasons.

Perfectly understandable. I was just wondering if there are new measures in place, not what they are. So thanks for replying.

One of the biggest problems is that many of the spambots aren't actually bots. There are real people behind many of the posts that get through, and these are extremely difficult to combat.

I've actually noticed that too. Such people (aside from disrupting normal people's communication) can obviously go past security measures meant to identify spambots (like the famous CAPTCHA texts). I understand.

Most of the Spammed Threads are in Korean.

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