appearance of BOTS recently

[dagus]

Hey guys...
I'm sure some of you noticed that in the last 24 hours, two threads here in the "Announcements" section have suddenly disappeared - there's a reason for that. No, I don't believe in censorship ...the threads were started by BOTS and I had to clean up, deleting the threads as well as deleting the BOTS' false memberships.

If you notice that someone new just made their first post, and it makes no sense or it just sounds odd, please let me know and I'll check them out, if I haven't seen it already. "If you see something, say something" as the NYC MTA slogan goes! Thanks for your help in keeping this forum the quality place to hang out that it is.

-Doug

[Soul]

I have noticed and I have also been doing my part. If you notice the drop of about 50 users. its because I have been trying to go through and delete bots..Ontop of deleting them I also ban every email domain that they come from so we dont get some from the same domain (lots come from the same domains)
So, if you see bots spamming please let the mods/admins know. And we will work on keeping them out of here.

[NT696]

OK: I will ask; What is a BOT and what is it normally supposed to do? Is it like automated telemarketing for forums?

[Soul]

Yes, bots will log in and just post worthless crap. Usually they just make gambling sites their signatures and things like that. They probably work two ways with that type of thing. They get click throughs from random idiots (sites track where their hits are coming from) and it gains them ranking in the search engines. Google works a lot by using its own crawl bots (go through your site and look at everything) and it looks for links. When it sees that tons of sites are linking to a specific thing it will rank what they are linking to higher than others in that category. does that make sense?
Another type of bot will crawl through the forums and try to grab email addresses from our users and stuff like that, off the members list. Majority of users do not share their email address so this is pretty worthless. In the end it just means that there are lots of dummy accounts created, and occasionally something spams our beloved forums.
Hopefully they explains it?
At least the email addresses are protected here.. Im sure plenty of bots have gone through the hawk mailing list archives to gather email addresses that are almost guaranteed to work.

[dagus]

The List is similarly protected.

One of the reasons us Listers went ballistic when an outside site "offered" the list content in Forum form to anyone who wanted it without being a member was that our info was out there, IIRC. A cease-and-desist went out immediately on that one!

[Kilter]

ah yes, the great nabble kerfluffle...
for a couple of days, I was getting 3 digests per day... nothing better than a good uproar/debate to flood the inbox.
except for maybe a oil thread...

[dagus]

"Oil, tires, politics and guns: these are the Four Theads of the Hawkocalypse."

[jaysun0ne]

http://www.hawkgtforum.com/viewtopic...asc&highlight=

heres one i think???

[Doc]

Erhrm! Doug!

[dagus]

Wow... that one had attitude, huh?

G'night, he says. Grrr.....

[Doc]

LOL

[dagus]

Hasta La Vista, Baby.

[Stevenjhow]

hey Doug.....does the multiple replies that everyone has been posting have anything to do with bots? I've noticed that in some of the threads, there is the same reply posted two or three times in a row, is it someone hitting "submit" more than once or does it have to do with bots?

[LeftRightLeftThrottle]

That happened to me too, I think its server lag either on our end or the forums, dunno.

[MrDude_1]

yea, on my forum, ive done a few small things..

i changed the "/phpBB2/profile.php?mode=register&agreed=true" on the first register screen to be "/phpBB2/profile.php?mode=register&agreedy=true" that one little Y throws out a few bots.
then im using a visual code you have to type in.. that throws of a few more.
it went from 100+ attempts a day down.... but i still get about 15 a day.

so as a final measure, i have it set so admin must approve all new users.
yea, i know it kinda sucks, but we have 3 admins, and between us, we noone waits mroe then a couple hours before they're approved (or deleted.. lol)