Bot Busting Thread

[Yukinu]

The bots have arrived. I was hoping the CAPTCHA would be effective but some are still getting in, so I'm working on some other techniques to block the bots.

My guess is these are SEO bots (they only post a few links, not too many, search engines probably detect too many links from a single site as spam and derank those sites).

[Grafo]

Glad to see you were able to get rid of the bots!
A while ago I had a similar problem on my guestbook, it's really annoying

[Yukinu]

Glad to see you were able to get rid of the bots!

yep, so far so good!

A while ago I had a similar problem on my guestbook, it's really annoying

annoying indeed, really makes you wonder how bots find sites in the first place. There are billions of web sites and web pages, but they still manage to find and try every single page on the entire internet it seems.

[Yukinu]

There was another bot, this one offering a phpBB captcha buster, intersting bot

[Galladite]

Kareha is a message board, and if you want a fairly unique captcha you can use its "captcha.pl" which generates the captchas locally and so lets you change all the settings for how they are generated to increase or decrease complexity.

The settings you can change are height, scribble, scaling, rotation and spacing.

[Yukinu]

Kareha is a message board, and if you want a fairly unique captcha you can use its "captcha.pl" which generates the captchas locally and so lets you change all the settings for how they are generated to increase or decrease complexity.

The settings you can change are height, scribble, scaling, rotation and spacing.

Thanks Galladite, I'll have to to look into this. I'm currently using the default phpBB captcha and have been looking into other locally generated captchas or tweaking the phpBB captcha to make it a bit more difficult for bots.

Also think I've actually come across this website before, looks familiar.

[Yukinu]

My bots today, this time posting in cyrillic characters. Seemed to be selling products and affliate links. Could be a similar bot script to the first set of bots, since they stop posting after a few topics and beat the captcha.

[Yukinu]

More bots, seems to be the same link bots.

[Yukinu]

The never ending stream of link bots is at it again, and this time more aggressive, creating 200+ posts.

[Amelia]

This really just shows how dire the Internet's bot problem has become. Makes me wonder whether the future of the web has no choice but to be invite only.