Forum still plagued by advertising bots
Posted: Tue Oct 31, 2023 11:22 am
How are they still getting in?
https://webdiplomacy.net/contrib/phpBB3/
https://webdiplomacy.net/contrib/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=4954
Oh no, I must have been hacked! Was this an Al Jazeera bot or a Mossad bot? Either way, they're getting more sophisticated. I was fooled into clicking on the link, but when I tried to share my opinions for money I kept getting the "pick a side" error. Now my credit card has suspicious charges for humus and my default homepage on Chrome was changed to zombo.com.
I just checked the challenge out out of curiosity. I noticed that you can keep tapping/clicking randomly until you pass the test. Maybe have the challenge reset after a certain number of clicks?kestasjk wrote: βMon Nov 06, 2023 4:04 amHmm.. Are they still as bad as before? If so that's annoying, I figured the click-the-countries challenge would surely be unique enough to filter them out.. That means it must be people completing the challenge, which seems like it surely wouldn't be worth it.
Hmm.. I doubt that's how the bots are getting through; it'd be weird to code a spam bot to just try randomly clicking a canvas in the hope it'll pass a spam test, and you wouldn't know when it passed.JECE wrote: βMon Nov 06, 2023 1:32 pmI just checked the challenge out out of curiosity. I noticed that you can keep tapping/clicking randomly until you pass the test. Maybe have the challenge reset after a certain number of clicks?kestasjk wrote: βMon Nov 06, 2023 4:04 amHmm.. Are they still as bad as before? If so that's annoying, I figured the click-the-countries challenge would surely be unique enough to filter them out.. That means it must be people completing the challenge, which seems like it surely wouldn't be worth it.
I found one from the 1st November and the timings and background info points to it being a human, at least during the registration stage.. Very odd that it'd be worth a persons time to register manually and post a spam message, I would've thought a spam message would be worth a fraction of a cent to whoever posts it.kestasjk wrote: βMon Nov 06, 2023 2:58 pmHmm.. I doubt that's how the bots are getting through; it'd be weird to code a spam bot to just try randomly clicking a canvas in the hope it'll pass a spam test, and you wouldn't know when it passed.JECE wrote: βMon Nov 06, 2023 1:32 pmI just checked the challenge out out of curiosity. I noticed that you can keep tapping/clicking randomly until you pass the test. Maybe have the challenge reset after a certain number of clicks?kestasjk wrote: βMon Nov 06, 2023 4:04 amHmm.. Are they still as bad as before? If so that's annoying, I figured the click-the-countries challenge would surely be unique enough to filter them out.. That means it must be people completing the challenge, which seems like it surely wouldn't be worth it.
In theory as long as the test is unique to your site it means a spam bot has to be customised to spam your site, and the hope is the customisation isn't worth it to the spam bot developer to be able to spam one extra site.
I think next time I see some spam I'll take a deeper look into the account that posted it, and try and see if the registration looked automated or human and go from there.
I haven't really noticed any spam recently though (maybe it's just getting cleaned quickly?). jamiet do you have a link to some recent spam?
This is just for the forum. The analytics don't point to a lot of new users arriving via the forum, but I'll keep an eye on it.Esquire Bertissimmo wrote: βMon Nov 06, 2023 5:36 pmSite visibility is way more important than stopping occasional spam posts on the forum IMO. What good is a spam-free WebDip with a dwindling player base?Or make it so the forum doesn't get indexed by search engines at all so isn't visible/useful to SEO bots, but that'd reduce the site's visibility also.. I guess I'll give this one a try and see how it goes.
I guess I'm a rare person who found this site upon seeing a forum post that provided a useful rule clarification.kestasjk wrote: βMon Nov 06, 2023 6:35 pmThis is just for the forum. The analytics don't point to a lot of new users arriving via the forum, but I'll keep an eye on it.Esquire Bertissimmo wrote: βMon Nov 06, 2023 5:36 pmSite visibility is way more important than stopping occasional spam posts on the forum IMO. What good is a spam-free WebDip with a dwindling player base?Or make it so the forum doesn't get indexed by search engines at all so isn't visible/useful to SEO bots, but that'd reduce the site's visibility also.. I guess I'll give this one a try and see how it goes.
The stats are fine btw, staying fairly steady.
stats.jpg
Well the block is in effect; no indexing and no following links, and search engines will crawl your site on an hourly basis, so it may well have gone into effect already.Esquire Bertissimmo wrote: βMon Nov 06, 2023 7:42 pmI guess I'm a rare person who found this site upon seeing a forum post that provided a useful rule clarification.kestasjk wrote: βMon Nov 06, 2023 6:35 pmThis is just for the forum. The analytics don't point to a lot of new users arriving via the forum, but I'll keep an eye on it.Esquire Bertissimmo wrote: βMon Nov 06, 2023 5:36 pm
Site visibility is way more important than stopping occasional spam posts on the forum IMO. What good is a spam-free WebDip with a dwindling player base?
The stats are fine btw, staying fairly steady.
stats.jpg
Doing a few unscientific Googling tests, it's surprisingly hard to get WebDip to come up in the results even when searching for things that have been discussed extensively on the forum (and even when using verbatim language copied from forum posts in the search).