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Bot Busting Thread

Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2022 6:14 pm
by 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).

Re: Bot Busting Thread

Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2022 10:34 pm
by 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 :(

Re: Bot Busting Thread

Posted: Thu Dec 01, 2022 5:01 am
by Yukinu
Grafo wrote: Wed Nov 30, 2022 10:34 pm Glad to see you were able to get rid of the bots!
yep, so far so good!
Grafo wrote: Wed Nov 30, 2022 10:34 pm 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.

Re: Bot Busting Thread

Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2022 1:59 am
by Yukinu
There was another bot, this one offering a phpBB captcha buster, intersting bot

Re: Bot Busting Thread

Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2022 12:24 pm
by 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.

Re: Bot Busting Thread

Posted: Sat Dec 24, 2022 4:42 am
by Yukinu
Galladite wrote: Sun Dec 18, 2022 12:24 pm 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.

Re: Bot Busting Thread

Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2023 8:50 pm
by 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.

Re: Bot Busting Thread

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2023 5:18 pm
by Yukinu
More bots, seems to be the same link bots.

Re: Bot Busting Thread

Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2023 4:52 am
by Yukinu
The never ending stream of link bots is at it again, and this time more aggressive, creating 200+ posts.

Re: Bot Busting Thread

Posted: Sun Apr 16, 2023 9:07 am
by 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.