BANG! and the Bots are gone.
 

Are you tired of seeing members on the online list who are actually bots?

Does it make you mad to think that these bastards are coming on to our boards and taking our bandwidth?

Well you need worry no longer! With Bots-be-Gone, you can implement a questionairre within your boards' registration form! That's right, and it's free, too!

The questionairre will choose a random question from a database and ask the bot, confusing it enough to stop it registering. Neat, huh?

This is where you, the member, comes in:

We need questions for the questionairre. Send the question and answer via PM (we don't want them in the wild where bots can find the answers!) to Lenny or WW, and do your part to save these boards from invasion.

The questions need to have definite answers (and only one), which potential real users will be able to work out. Things like:

Who is Britney Spears?

a: A food.
b: A type of donkey.
c: A woman who sings songs.
d: Over NINE THOUSAND!!

That's right! Send your questions now, and be part of the Bots-be-Gone revolution!

BANG! and the bots are gone.

b-d all work.

This is a good idea... but I'm lazy as hell.

OH GOD! I can't escape it!

Seriously, a couple of my co-workers and I use that phrase A LOT.

You know, I created my own bot blocker a long time ago. It goes on the basis of a hidden input and a question.

The input CSS was display:none; so that normal users can't see it. If there's text inside the box, then you would know it was a bot or idiot with styles turned off. Then I had a question that was simple, "Are you a bot?" with a yes, no, and maybe. Tested it out, and never had a bot pass through. So if you're going to bot blocks, follow what I did, because it's proven to work.

All you have to do is change the name of the CAPTCHA field and you eliminate all automated registrations. Unfortunately, this is not sustainable as a plugin.

That's not true at all. They were getting through my custom made blog system and custom made captcha and theme. They're smarter than you think. All they ever posted was crap that didn't help them because I used rel='nofollow', but it was annoying. Later on I eventually created an algebra problem maker, which was sufficient to keep them and children out.

On Zelaron it works because they expect a certain form. Posting spam without registration is different than registering then posting spam, and different programs are used.

That's all very well, but our main problems are the fact that, as a custom script, it needs to not only fit in with the forum software but also give us the ability to easily update to the latest vBulletin versions.

Why go through all the trouble when you can use a built-in feature?

Another consideration was, as mentioned above by WW (and implied by my first post), that bots that target forums are programmed to fill in a standard form. Tailoring a bot to a specific forum registration greatly reduces its range and effectiveness. By changing our registration system to something it's not programmed to complete, the bot will not be able to submit the form. If it's a clever bot designed to be able to recognise different form objects, it has a 25% chance of answering the question correctly - in itself that will cut down on the number of bots dramatically. Finally, the bots which are signed up by humans and then let loose, are so few and far between that they're not worth acting against as we can pick them up incredibly easily.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that, unless the programmer has a lot of time on his hands, and has perfected the algorithm, bots won't be able to answer questions without guessing because they don't have a 'knowledge' of context. That is, they won't be able to correctly identify the answer to the question without explicitly knowing it.

I'd tend to go with a system that asks for answers that aren't already given, myself. Some kind of numerical answer, like the algebra that GLG was talking about.

The idea is to keep bots away, not everyone... though a Retard Shield might be...interesting.

WW has told me that the questionairre is single input, which is slightly annoying, but in no way affects the questions - still send a question and four possibilities (unless it's a question which can be asked and answered straight off), we'll just include all in the question and give an instruction to those signing up to type the correct answer in the box.

What about the whole "Type what you see" thing that other places have?

We've got one, and the number of bots indicates that it doesn't work (CAPTCHA's are cracked regularly these days, and seeing as they're a common feature for most forms, bots will be programmed to break them).

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y97...pboard02-6.jpg

Bad news, everyone!

Our supreme, and benevolent, Overlord WW has got around to implementing the questionairre on the registration page:

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y97/Lenny1882/reg.jpg

Snazzy, huh?

Six questions out of the countless number submitted (thirteen. From three people. The rest of you should be ashamed!) have been chosen for use, which should hopefully keep the bots confuzzled for a wee while.

All hail WW!

EDIT: Dayum, he beat me to it: http://zelaron.com/forum/showthread.php?t=49604 :(

And in his haste he misspelled "mandatory". Ironic, huh? ;)

Sexy!

Imo, XBox360 Live could be its own country.

Whale!!! The answer is Whale!!!!

The internest basically is, yeah?
We have our own words, and our own customs, amirite?

Since Monday I've been monitoring the number of new members, the number of new posts and the number of new threads. I've also been checking for bots.

For those of you that don't know, bots usually enter "123456" into one of the fields in the "About Me" section on their profile. I've been using that to identify bots (I don't think every bot does it, but the vast majority do. I think they do it to make them look like real members).

These figures aren't final (I'll post them on Monday, along with figures from a few weeks before the change to the registration system), but over the course of six days we've had:

Twenty-three new members, ten of whom posted. Those ten posted, between them, seventy-six times, of which one post was a new thread. Of the twenty-three new members, zero were bots (that is, no fields in their profiles are "123456". In fact, all twenty-three members have left their profiles blank).

What's even more amazing is if you look at the list of online members - over the past few days, there have been very few names in dark grey (the dark grey colour shows members with no posts - bots and spammers, mostly, apart from the Arcade Lurkers).

Personally I think that the addition of the questionnaire to the registration page is a success, and one that has made the amount of spam more manageable (not that it was too hard to manage in the first place - just more time consuming).

Awesome.