In the last 3 months...

madmat

Soup Nazi
In the last three months I've banned 1817 forum spammers and Doomsday by accident. I'd like to say a sincere I'm sorry to Doomsday. I'm sorry I banned you by accident, I'll do my utmost to see it never happens again.

To the spammers: I'm looking forward to the next 1800.
 

RainMotorsports

Partition Master
Spammers don't read forums.

Actually need to contact a spammer in china and tell him to fix his spambot so it actually works at all.

My gaming communities site is getting hit up with SQL errors from a single bot trying to stick all its spammy details into the fields mostly links and chinese characters. But the character set is incorrect so it throws an sql error.

So instead of seeing 0% evidence of spam, since well thanks to playthru we see 0% spam and 99.9% of the people trying to sign up...eek. I see errors in my email.... if anything is annoying its error emails lol.
 

RainMotorsports

Partition Master
LOL, Rain. That made that day! :D

I ended up IP range banning the city of Xiamen.

PlayThru is very effective but once in awhile we get an email from someone in europe that couldn't sign up. One guy claimed he tried on several PC's but I have yet to find a configuration that doesnt work. Pre HTML 5 browsers are served up flash and modern browsers use HTML 5 and Java script so unless every computer you have is blocking both and or using odd browsers.... I do worry about those that might not be contacting us though.

Turn off PlayThru and enable ReCaptcha we get a spammer per hour.
 

madmat

Soup Nazi
I really wasn't aiming this at spammers. I was more interested in letting Doomsday know I was sorry and how it happened. I figured a public apology was fitting.
 

marfig

No ROM battery
Turn off PlayThru and enable ReCaptcha we get a spammer per hour.

I'm not sure the impact spam has been taking on TG. I suspect very little. It's one of the reasons I find madmat's quest funny. The other being he's trying to kill an elephant with a duster.

However, as I said I suspect the impact of spam on TG is relatively small and probably doesn't justify moving away from captcha.

I do have a beef with PlayThru. It doesn't penalize failed attempts and it reveals success by emptying the screen of flying objects as they are placed on the right spot. For this reason a brute force attack could be theoretically made in which objects are forcefully dragged at high speeds and until something happens. I think the team has to think of better games, games that penalize failure and games that maintain the same level of complexity throughout the playing.

BTW, playthru doesn't handle another type of brute force attack common on spammers from china and india. captcha solver farms are common on these places. 10 or so people sitting all day on a computer solving captchas. Playthru is actually a much easier "captcha" to solve than Captcha. Give it some more time to become ubiquitous enough and I suspect this playthru will fall apart for how easy it will be to break.
 
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RainMotorsports

Partition Master
I am sure it will fail in good time, wasn't my decision to use it but after having resorted to the alternatives in times of transition I know it saves us 24 bans and 100 post deletes a day. Its pretty bad that OCR software is a requirement to get past recaptcha and being a human is more or less a handicap. There is a site I have to use it to login every time and I just don't go there.

I dunno how long it took Captcha to become obsolete but its easy enough for a human to get through and would be easy enough to block bots if people weren't so damned determined. But I do like that it doesn't take me up to 15 minutes to get into a website anymore with crap like recaptcha. I often don't even try anymore until I have an image I know I can get through.

China thinks its bad they're government firewalls them? Too bad China is an emerging market as all the world needs to do is block China. Try again in 100 years when your mature enough and enjoy North Korea's view of the world for a little while longer. It will never happen and awesomely enough even if it did China's government would actually be upset about it... humans. No one heard of a phone or a fax machine :p

Yeah once you go back to using humans, anything designed for a human should fail. Which is why forums often resort to moderating a user for their first post maybe restricting things like links for 10 posts. Its easy to get in with a human and then turn the account over to the bot. Its more time consuming for a human to jump through the extra hoops. Many types of forums don't wish to hold their users up from getting involved and they fall victim due to their decision on regulating users.
 
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Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Ironic: there was a spammer who posted in here.

But no one but me ever saw a thing! Buahahahahahahaha.
 
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