Forum Spam Blocking

[MeerCaT]

This forum does a fantastic job of keeping out spam posts, but the poor folks over at Open Office Forum don't seem to be able to prevent the constant tirade of spam that all forums are at risk from.

 

What is the Eagle forum doing so right that the OO forum is doing so wrong?

[sobek]

I'm not sure that it would be a good idea to disclose publicly. :)

[PeterP]

1. Asking very hard questions while registration! :)

2. Very good Moderator staff.

[Boberro]

On our forum there were also spam bot attacks. We applied questions - example how many wings does plane have, how many engines does MiG-29 have or what phone do I use :D

Spam defeated completely.

[sobek]

2. Very good Moderator staff.

 

Indeed. Groove must have been an intelligence service profiler in his former life. :D

[MeerCaT]

I'm not sure that it would be a good idea to disclose publicly. :)

 

Ok, I can respect that. Probably for the best.

 

It suggests that forum operators all implement different means, methods and mechanisms for combating spam. Each one re-inventing their own little wheel.

 

Now I'm not knocking Eagle for doing this, since they have clearly made themselves a very nice perfectly formed wheel of their own.

But being a software developer I'm all about standards and standardisation.

 

A solution for one person is likely to work for another person if they both share an identical problem.

 

Surely some bunch of clever bods have come up with a best practice for securing forum software, no?

 

Eitherway, however Eagle are achieving it perhaps someone could pop over to OOF and drop a few hints to the admins there about how they might close some of their gaping holes.

It's a shame to see such a well-meaning community suffering like that.

[sobek]

Well, as already stated by PeterP, a powerful reverse turing test can make a lot of a difference (and is easy to make). Also, there are plugins for ban databases for forum software, so the forum checks in the database if the IP of a registering user has been used for spam recently and if yes, he is not allowed to register.

[MeerCaT]

1. Asking very hard questions while registration!

 

I must admit 'CAPTCHA' isn't quite the golden bullet (or should that be golden shield?) that many hoped, and others claimed.

 

'Random' questions. Yeah I guess that is a pretty good bolt on the door.

[Yurgon]

1. Asking very hard questions while registration! :)

 

I'd say, asking specific questions. Boberro's examples are indeed pretty good for a flight sim/flight community forum. On an OpenOffice forum it's probably a bit harder to come up with questions that don't exclude any real humans, but it's still a good way to go. Also, simple math questions are popping up all over the net.

 

On large, heavily frequented forums, it's probably also necessary do use IP bans as was already suggested.

 

In terms of a true CAPTCHA, it's my strong opinion that distorted images with text on them have failed. Computers are too good to decipher them and humans are too bad (I surely am). Then again, some of the most successful Jeopardy players have already been beaten by a computer. Coming up with a true and efficient CAPTCHA is not an easy task.

 

And that's where good and fast moderation comes into play to quickly delete whatever bot made it through.

 

Personally, I can't give any better advice than that. The few forum installations I'm administrating are, gladly, fairly small. For a good long while I defeated bots by asking a specific question during registration, but that doesn't work anymore, so I simply switched to administrator authorization. With one human user every two months or so and new bots every couple of days that's the way that currently requires the least amount of my time.