New verification questions

Aaaand I never got around to adding those questions.

It's done now though. Hopefully with the result being less spam.

I was wondering >.>

 

I was wondering >.>

Yeah, just killed a bot recently and that reminded me.

 

I have been noticing far more spambots lately...I was going to ask soon.

Hopefully it keeps the legion away for now!

 

I tried to make a new account and the verification thing was there.


It works.

 

Kind of related, what's your take on spammer IP blacklist tools like zbblock?

 

Blacklists are prone to occasional false positives. Especially in the world of dynamic IP addresses.

I'm thinking a custom honeypot field may be the way to go. I've added in the field, I just need to figure out how to verify it and stop the registration process on verification failure. Failing that I could always verify and auto ban after registration but then the member list will just explode with auto banned members.

 

I'm not sure the verification questions have had much of an effect...I'm seeing a new spam thread every day now. D:

(There's one right outside at this moment, which prompted me to post here.)

After researching what a honeypot field is, I have a feeling it will be a lot more useful in keeping the bots away. ^^

 

The daily registrations are down from double digits to single digits, so the new questions are having an effect, if not enough of one.

The bots that are getting through are clever. They specifically ignore any field that is not marked as required to avoid parsing requirements where necessary. This behaviour doesn't work on custom forms, but most of these spambots are clearly built specifically for IPB, so they can get away with it because they understand the rules. So the best course of action is to break the rules. To do this I have just fooled IPB into marking the invisible honeypot field as required while continuing to parse it as optional. If this encourages spambots to fill in the field during rego then I can proceed further and block rego for these spambots entirely or auto ban them (only if I can't block them, since this option is less ideal), depending on the level of control hooks allow.

 

What if we added a field that said something backwards? For example, ".ko epyt neht sdrawkcab siht daeR" <ok>

 

"Try to raed tihs adn tpye teh wrdos cvae sotry"

 

"Si hablas en este lenguaje, escribe a máquina "Cuento de Cueva" en inglés.

 

I can't read esperanto

 

I sure hope you even know what Esperanto is.