Spam Bots

[OptimusPrime]

On message boards you moderate/administrate on how do you deal with spam bots and are you frequent with spam bots or very rarely? I've been getting a few on Muppets Forum and had one actually make a total of 24 posts before I checked up and saw the spam bot posting. :P I ban them, remove their profile information, lock and trash their topics and add them to a banned group with banned rank and black username.

[MattVon]

The forum I administrate attracts millions of spam bots, right now we're getting a huge batch of them directed from China and NL. I've banned over a dozen IP ranges, as well as several email services, that isn't common for the average PC user. But me and my team ban them, and trash anything they've made.

[OptimusPrime]

More come to MyBB related forums than phpBB for some weird reason. Though you should put on some spam-stopper stuff.

[Jess]

I use a Captcha to prevent any from registering in the first place. but a few days ago, two users joined and each made 1 post that was definitely spam...I believe they were spam bots...but I banned them and they were automatically moved to the banned group with a gray username and a strikethrough through their name

[Kaius]

We usually get them fairly quickly here, the ones that usually get maybe 5 or more posts are the ones that mass post as quickly as possible.

[Origami]

reCaptcha helps stop them to an extent.

However, as former VT administrator Maverick suggested for me on EY- try creating a Q&A form on the registration. Don't make it something easily googleable(lol?) or too complicated. Don't use "Type Human if you're not a bot." That's just too easy. But be creative with it and make a range of them. For us, it put an immediate halt from 40 a week to 1 every 2 or 3 months.

Also combining reCaptcha with a Q&A or any two forms of countermeasures will help.
You can also be sure to be the IP every time, as well as activating your providers standard spambot countermeasures.

[OptimusPrime]

I'm not a fan of ReCaptcha for some reason. I know it's a nice Captcha but it's just nothing I've really worked with.

[Origami]

I'm not a fan of ReCaptcha for some reason. I know it's a nice Captcha but it's just nothing I've really worked with.

It helps. Not by much, but it helps.

[OptimusPrime]

For my Joomla sites I use the paid Captcha plugin. It's very basic but seems to do better than message boards with more advanced Captcha. Unless of course the damn bots don't know how to get past Community Builder registeration. Lol

And I have a feeling I just made a bad spelling.

[Origami]

Registration. (:

But yes, while a lot of bots are stupid, it's good to have a back-up to block them. We've disabled reCaptcha for now due to the Q&A working so well.

http://screensnapr.com/v/BKWPwp.png

[OptimusPrime]

Questions and Answers works well with most forum softwares.

[Jess]

I use a Sortables Captcha. I changed temporarily to a Q&A one

[OptimusPrime]

On a forum I moderate which runs vBulletin it gets hit quite a bit. Usually happens when I check the MOD queue or am online to check up on things. lol