bclarkie wrote:It seems the forum is starting to become more and more of a target for spammers. The last four sign ups all came within the last 24 hours and all four are spam bot accounts.
improvstone wrote:How does the bot actually create an account when a code from an image is required?
deimos3428 wrote:I believe there is an option in the forum software that will force new members to be accepted "manually". It might be worthwhile to turn that setting on temporarily, until the bot IPs have been logged and blocked.
NetRodent wrote:IP blocking is pretty much useless these days.
mbassoc2003 wrote:Why not just get new users to require approval of their membership from the board. Give access to approve any of the board moderators, or designated members.
Mars wrote:I don't think this is a very difficult thing to do. It's easy check the page source to find the image usually with a text input beside it and then run some kind of edge detection specifically trying to find letters or numbers. This kind of optical recognition stuff has been developed very thoroughly over the years and a decent routine is easily available.You might notice on places like Ebay they try and distort the image as much as possible so you can barely read what it says - this is just an attempt to fool the routines and it doesn't seem to work very well either.
improvstone wrote:OK .. then time to add some questions that a bot couldn't possibly answer. eg. Gary's Last Name? or Eye of the what? Maybe even put the question in the image.If a spammer does join then you know it isn't a bot ...