Those Damn Bots

[ark_ader]

Hi have a site that is for a small clan that I use the SMF software under the service provider's auto installer.

I had the latest version, applied all the patches, but even when I use Captcha I still got the odd Bot logging in trying to populate the board with viagra and polish mistresses. 

I took some time off for exams and when I came back I had over 4000 posts of all sorts of crap.  Took me ages to rid myself of it.  In the end I had to delete it and start again with Drupal 7.

Now I am getting the sames issues with Drupal (latest and greatest) with Captcha and the same sort of bots.

Should I be looking elsewhere for the hole they seem to be getting through? 

[saint]

It's a never ending and losing game. That's why I finally went to manual verification of accounts even with the Captcha and such.

[404]

depending on what version you are running, try creating a challenge question. newer versions have this feature build in. Later versions can find a mod on the smf forums to do this.

[MonMotha]

I help admin a phpBB forum.  We had lots of trouble with spambots both back on phpBB2 and on phpBB3 even with the new CAPTCHA.  They're just so popular that the robots are written to work with them.

We found that simply leaving everything as-is but adding a small caption that says "Ignore the image above and just type 'some text'." and hacking up the script to simply accept that text and nothing else as valid has completely eliminated the spam.  I'm sure it wouldn't work if your forum is popular enough to be specifically targeted, but it will totally axe the standard robots.

It also helps eliminate registrations by people who don't read directions   (I think we also changed the title of that section of the registration form to "Can you follow simple directions?")

[404]

I help admin a phpBB forum.  We had lots of trouble with spambots both back on phpBB2 and on phpBB3 even with the new CAPTCHA.  They're just so popular that the robots are written to work with them.

We found that simply leaving everything as-is but adding a small caption that says "Ignore the image above and just type 'some text'." and hacking up the script to simply accept that text and nothing else as valid has completely eliminated the spam.  I'm sure it wouldn't work if your forum is popular enough to be specifically targeted, but it will totally axe the standard robots.

It also helps eliminate registrations by people who don't read directions   (I think we also changed the title of that section of the registration form to "Can you follow simple directions?")

I ran a phpbb forum for a while before converting it over to IPB. Your best bet is to simply use one of the custom captchas on the phpbb website. Since phpbb 3.06, phpbb now has a custom captcha plugin system that allows anyone to create their own captchas.There are plenty to choose from. The stock phpBB3 captcha is not enough.

When all else fails, you can go into the control panel and make a custom profile field and use that to make a simple challenge question that everyone must fill out during registration.

[MonMotha]

We haven't had a single bot registration since doing what I mentioned above YEARS ago.  They may have a plugin system for it now, but back then it was way easier to just hack the source up a little.  I literally just changed the comparison between the entered CAPTCHA and the stored verification string to a comparison with a constant and hacked up the template to tell people what to do.  Works like a charm.

Again, I'm sure it wouldn't work if I were hotmail, but then probably neither would any of the other custom CAPTCHAs.  If anything, spammers breaking CAPTCHAs has probably done wonders to advance the field of OCR.