Castle Paradox

Bob the Hamster · Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2012 1:06 pm Post subject: Spam robots

I think it is safe to say that the spam robots have completely defeated the MathCaptcha that CastleParadox is using to control account registration.

It might be time to try a different captcha :(

Greenwado · Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2012 2:17 pm Post subject:

I was just about to say that!
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Bob the Hamster · Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2012 8:53 am Post subject:

This reminds me that they have completely deleted the captcha on the OHRRPGCE wiki. I should just remove it.

The only reason the wiki isn't bombarded by several hundred spams a day is because I ban all posts that contain urls that come from users who have not been approved yet.

Cube · **Dimensional Traveller** Joined: 02 Feb 2003 Posts: 294

Bob the Hamster · Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 7:48 am Post subject:

The wiki's defeated captcha has things like:

What year was Winston Churchill born? (If you don't know, just google it)

but the spammers had no trouble breaking that. I think they must have some fairly sophisticated tools. Probably whenever the robot encounters a new text captcha, it marks it for an operator to check manually, and when they have done that the answer goes into a database (probably shared with many other spammers) so the robots can break it automatically.

Bob the Hamster · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2013 2:13 pm Post subject:

Looks like we are having a fresh influx of spam robots.

TMC · Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2013 2:12 am Post subject:

IM kindly gave me the ability to, so I went through the user list and deleted all spambots I could identify which had registered in the last few years. (Sadly I couldn't manage to automate it.) Since the ones we had tended to stay quiet for a long time before spamming, and quite a number had managed to register, this should be much better.

I think it's a good idea to use a captcha that is site-specific, so that a lookup list won't help. For example, I changed the captcha to "What is the name of this website?" for now.
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