Whats with all the spambots lately?

[Ming]

True enough... but I agree with UR's earlier statement that we aren't really dealing with true ad bots. These are live people and the suggested changes won't really help. If Apolyton were to start getting attacked by real ad bots, then a change will have to be made.

[Thue]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


Capcha can in theory be solved, though that will have to involve advanced machine vision. If a machine can read capcha it can probably read "write 2 in this text box to prove that you are not a bot" with slight modifications.

But the text (and the action required) would be different at each site. So the bots would have to be truly intelligent to be able to parse and understand arbitrary text.

[Mercator]

Captcha's are randomly generated images with warped text. Bots can't get around that easily. It's much easier to get around the one question that one human only needs to see once to open the flood gates.

[Zkribbler]

And don't forget, kids, there's that exclamation point thingie in the yellow triangle on the right side of each post you can use to report spam to a moderation.

[Mercator]

Though as Ming points out in his sig, a PM to the moderators likely works faster.

[Urban Ranger]

It looks like the current measures are enough to deter bots since I haven't seen any invasion of sorts. Now that most BBS software requires activation by e-mail, so a bot needs to incorporate some e-mail client functions in additional to be able to interpret HTTP and HTML soup. This appears to be difficult enough that most spammers now hire real people to do the work instead. I have seen these recruiting adverts ("Make money working from home!").