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Topic: Try Again, Spambots

Wow, the spambots have made over 1200 posts in recent weeks while I've been working on other things. I guess it's time to do something about them. I've created six lines of code that I think will stop over 99% of it (unless they can adapt like the Borg). Then maybe we can start having fun with them. I do have a history of playing with the people who run nefarious bots on my websites. When I coded my lost web server, I noticed bots looking for vulnerabilities to hack, so I had the server send them explicit material that is legal here but illegal there instead of sending 404 errors. This way, they had to check to see what the results are, and they end up with files that get them in trouble with their government or boss, or they get distracted, or they become frustrated because I'm sending binary data instead of the text they expected, and it screws up their logs. Either way, I'm laughing.

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Re: Try Again, Spambots

Welp, the bots appear to be screwed. A few posts are still getting through because regular expressions in PHP are incompatible with what I'm accustomed to, but I think I've fixed that. If I do the other things I'm considering, the spambots won't even have a chance, but I'll make sure this layer of protection is working perfectly before I add more layers.

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Re: Try Again, Spambots

Also, I noticed that the spambots often link to profiles on other forums, so I made sure their profiles here don't help them at all. Users must now make five posts for their contact information to be visible, including any website. Of course, when they post, they will get their account deleted, so they have no way to win here.

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Re: Try Again, Spambots

I noticed tonight that the spambots are still getting some posts through my filters, so I installed PHP and tested my regular expressions on my own computer until I discovered the bug. When they made 1200 posts recently while I was busy doing other things, there were several posts that didn't fit these filters I've devised, but even those posts will likely be eliminated by the additional layers of defenses that I will soon add, so I'm not worried about the spambots as the website begins to gain more visitors.