Build and Shoot

Can somebody please ban this bot?

We're being spammed by that bloody Polish website, he's made multiple accounts already. A shame we can't get someone involved who can stop the site altogether, since I bet the bloody CEO's are running this charade.
Note: The website charges you in return boosting your site's hit-count thus boosting it up search lists, this may be the site "boosting" us, thanks to an anonymous payment from someone, however spamming us with ads is a stupid way to boost a site. (I concluded they boost sites after the site was translated from Polish to English, this made it difficult to read at times, so I'm not 100% sure, only they talk about "positioning customers" and offered a paid service.)

@Dan, we need CAPTCHA. I'll happily fill one out every time I post or log in etc. But it's costing you money having bots flood the system with Polish ad spam.

How about "Please enter the letters you see here in reverse order."

Naw, the bot would read that and figure out how to do the captcha.

Space Inspader wrote:

Naw, the bot would read that and figure out how to do the captcha.

not if it's in an image.

Making stronger CAPTCHAS is a rat race. That said if we did interspersed images and recorded words we would be winning (temporarily).

You could make it so if your posting really frequently, it would then make you do a captcha at your next post, then continue to do it randomly every so often.

jordan wrote:

You could make it so if your posting really frequently, it would then make you do a captcha at your next post, then continue to do it randomly every so often.

YouTube's comments system does this, and it seems to work tolerably well. Granted, our forums don't have quite the traffic of YouTube, so we'd have fewer bots/spammers/trolls to worry about.

I thus conclude my analysis.

Mrmath130 wrote:

jordan wrote:

You could make it so if your posting really frequently, it would then make you do a captcha at your next post, then continue to do it randomly every so often.

YouTube's comments system does this, and it seems to work tolerably well. Granted, our forums don't have quite the traffic of YouTube, so we'd have fewer bots/spammers/trolls to worry about.

I thus conclude my analysis.

I see but this technique would still work though, correct?

What Sonarpulse said - it's a rat race. The most effective captcha system that is also tolerable is to have, on the registration page, recaptcha and a custom question (such as "What are the initials of this site?" or "What is one of the team colours in Ace of Spades?"). Recaptcha is a proven captcha system, and the custom question works to stop spambots that aren't targeted specifically at this website. After that, it's not worth increasing the complexity as you end up harming real people more than spammers and bots.

Ah I forgot about that. Asking AoS specific questions is surprisingly affective because people making spam bots are interested in targeting huge numbers of sites, so hunting for niche trivia for every community is not worth the effort.