Forum still plagued by advertising bots

[Jamiet99uk]

How are they still getting in?

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

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[Jamiet99uk]

Funny guy.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

Funny guy.

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.

[kestasjk]

Hmm.. 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.

[JECE]

Hmm.. 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 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]

Hmm.. 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 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?

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.
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?

[kestasjk]

Hmm.. 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 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?

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.
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?

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.

One possibility is to make it so you need to have joined a game or something.. but then if someone is creating / looking for their first game they wouldn't be able to get help..
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.

Crazy this is still an issue in 2023.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

[/quote]

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.

[/quote]

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?

[kestasjk]

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.

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?

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.

The stats are fine btw, staying fairly steady.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

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.

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?

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.

The stats are fine btw, staying fairly steady.
stats.jpg

I guess I'm a rare person who found this site upon seeing a forum post that provided a useful rule clarification.

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).

[kestasjk]

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?

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.

The stats are fine btw, staying fairly steady.
stats.jpg

I guess I'm a rare person who found this site upon seeing a forum post that provided a useful rule clarification.

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).

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.

Interesting you found this place via a forum post.. It is a shame to cut this place off, but I understand people being frustrated with spambots too. Let's see how it goes for a few weeks and if there are still spam posts I'll turn it off, if there are suddenly no spam posts .. we'll have to think about it.

Looking at the stats some people do arrive here via the forum, but not that many..

But for sure if it doesn't stop the spambots I'll reenable indexing.

[kestasjk]

Damn .. just noticed another spammer. Whoever it is was hiding links to some crappy game website for kids so that it couldn't be seen in their post. Based on the messages and timing it's definitely a person, probably someone affiliated closely with the site.

I guess it doesn't matter that the forum is now configured so search engines won't follow those links so it's a waste of their time, but still very annoying.

I've disabled url=https://webdiplomacy.net]test[/url] URL link BBCode to prevent it, but I think we'll need to have some kind of tiered user system where new users are limited and only get to post URLs etc after passing some threshold.. What a pain..

I've reenabled search engine indexing so people can see the forum via search again, but I've left on nofollow so that no links posted within the forum here will be followed by search engines.