Currently active users:
panthrax,
immuffnuh,
shenaxsfdb,
Intatoicola,
shenaztbql,
shenakxfht,
arcadlill,
VeibeFekzitty,
carpinteyroqqm,
Swerrethy,
shenaurrun,
Sonorsmen,
shenavakit,
alolepype,
dringenek,
tomsdtd,
Alampnummug,
RemadE,
Greatttwenelm,
palaalmorce,
ojzenz8j,
SPOOLODIA,
LizSeqRed,
shenansygj,
CartErendadon,
shenagmwir
I can tell just by looking at the usernames that 99% of the users currently active are bots. How do you guys handle them here? Back on Zoklet, myself or a few others with the ability would "Delete Posts As Spam" which would delete every spambot post they had made with some advertisement then we would ban the bot from the IP level.
Of course they continued to return over and over and it was a constant battle. I had temporarily closed registration in part due to bots, but also due to other reasons as well. When I was last on Zoklet about a month ago or so, registration was still closed. Not sure if it still is or not...
Anyway, that's all besides the point. How do you guys handle the bots? I see that they are registered users that are currently active, but I don't see any of their posts. Is it due to post/thread moderation in place?
Just curious.
Comments
It kind of threw me off at first, when I was still trying to decide if I was going to try posting here or not. I saw 25-40 users online pretty much every time I checked. On closer inspection, they appear to be all bots. Besides myself, I've seen 4 other people post in the past week and most of them have been you, Dfg.
What happened? I swear I remember this place being more lively a few years ago.
Times have changed. We're most geared towards life but we're slowly coming back. And yes most are bots. There used to be 200+ of them here scrapping stuff until I kicked their arse.
The bots are a pain in the arse though.
Well before I went Nazi on the bots, they would simply register and get stuck because I had a simple plugin that will ask them to click on the rules page and accept our community rules. The bot operator didn't see that one. However, they did rape my Database with massive account creation.
When I saw the amount of lurkers and bots lurking this website and eating away the bandwidth, I mean it's like more than 400GB or something PER MONTH, I was like wtf is that shit.
Then I investigated, the bots would create an account and use the HOMEPAGE field and add their website name for SEO BS and then they would add random as ICQ numbers. The website they linked were from RUSSIA and other spammy Countries. But only Help and Suggestion forum was bombed due to Anonymous posting option.
So, I took steps:
A) Remove the Homepage field
Setup an auto redirection for bots.
C) Integrate a honeypot into the website to track everyone (bots) and get them blacklisted.
D) Setup plugins defense system. They're collection of plugins that log and monitor bots and users and based on their behavior ban them or alert the admins.
Everything is mostly automated. Most bots can't register anyway, the ones that can must be real human in order to actually post something and if they do post something it gets into moderation log assuming the user is not a bot.
Also, PM and posting options has been restricted. If a possible user comes in, I manually upgrade them to regular accounts.
Well I can Country ban some Country. China and India are low potential targets. Even Pakistan is better left banned.