Bloody bots

Bananna man

I was having problems with bots on my forum based website that i wrote so i put in a thing where a random 3 digit number is generated and when you are leaving feedback on the site you have to re-type this number to be able to proceed.

No sooner had i set this up i see another bloody bot post :mad: What should i do about this?

Thanks

obrienb

Is the number displayed as an image or as selectable text?

thebman

The number should be an image with an unusual font. Not like the one here so a bot can't read it.

Or you could require a valid email address which the user must click a link in to activate their post. After 24 hours, discard all the posts that have not been validated.

Bananna man

I just put it in as selectable text. If i put in an image how is it generated and how do you assign a hidden number to it?

Thanks

mneylon

Which forum software are you using? There are captcha plugins available for most of them at this stage

obrienb

As blacknight stated, there are plugins available for all the major forum softwares but the impression I got was that you programmed the software yourself?

forum based website that i wrote

Bots can scan the source code of the page and selectable text is always visible in the source code. Use an image that has distorted numbers (but still not to hard for a human to see) instead. Sign up for an email address with a provider like yahoo! and see how they use it.

Eoin

Are you using a robots.txt file to exclude certain pages, or does this not actually work?
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#robotstxt

Bananna man

obrienb wrote:

As blacknight stated, there are plugins available for all the major forum softwares but the impression I got was that you programmed the software yourself?


Bots can scan the source code of the page and selectable text is always visible in the source code. Use an image that has distorted numbers (but still not to hard for a human to see) instead. Sign up for an email address with a provider like yahoo! and see how they use it.

I've seen those things before but i dont know how to go about setting one up. I wrote the forum myself with php so will probably need to add this thing myself. Anyone know of a good tutorial for this?

Eoin

Bananna man wrote:

I've seen those things before but i dont know how to go about setting one up. I wrote the forum myself with php so will probably need to add this thing myself. Anyone know of a good tutorial for this?

First result on google for "create image + PHP":

http://ie2.php.net/gd

Don't know anything about PHP, but that looks like it should do the trick. I reckon you just have to create a random string and save it as a Session variable, or whatever the PHP equivalent is. Create an image with the same string in it, and then just compare the session variable with what the user enters.

miju

has anyone here heard how catchpa now no longer works as a security barrier against spammers as they're bots have found a way around it and reading the images

case in point www.bottower.com , a little program i use to get rid of the tedius nature of myspace and their catchpa, the program sails through their catchpa every time and just keeps on going

would be interested to know how they do it though

dionsiseire

i had a load of spam bots on my forums recently

i changed to email activation to get the account going and the amount of spam has significantly dropped.

1 or 2 has slipped in still, but its down at least 95% from the previous issue's