board77

What's with this XenuAntiSpamb poster? Is he/she legit?

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Melkor and Ungoliant in need of some relationship counselling.

I don't know if bots are still a problem and even if they are, I don't know if you'd have the ability to do this, but a pretty effective anti-bot strategy is to put a hidden field on the registration form and reject any submissions that have it filled in (it's more effective if the hidden attribute comes from a CSS class defined in a separate file).

This new member, sdfsdfsdf, has bot written all over it...

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Melkor and Ungoliant in need of some relationship counselling.

It's deleted.

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I don't want to turn away any legitimate users, but I suspect that some of our more recent joiners are bots...

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Melkor and Ungoliant in need of some relationship counselling.

I've looked at least one of them and couldn't tell for sure. (I didn't see any obvious signs, but I did look quickly.)

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I looked up the three who have joined after January 1st of this year. Their IP addresses come back to India and Pakistan.


???

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I know that our newest member, Rj158Zmonp, is a bot - reason I haven't deleted it yet is that I'm waiting to see if it'll make a spam post somewhere, and I'm just curious what sort of crap it'll be pushing.

Of course, if any of you get impatient and just want to delete the thing, I won't stand in your way

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Melkor and Ungoliant in need of some relationship counselling.

I deleted one the other day, but we can see what this one will do. Or delete it soon. Whichever.

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I could be wrong but I suspect Mikeliu is a bot...

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These are my friends, see how they glisten...

Aw, can we keep that one? He's kind of cute.

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GNU Terry Pratchett

What you're seeing are my edits to its posts, which were originally links to the website it was trying to promote.

Eventually, I'll delete it, but I'm curious as to whether it'll keep posting spammy links, or whether there's an actual human behind it that might complain about how its posts are being edited.

Stay tuned!

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Melkor and Ungoliant in need of some relationship counselling.

Oh! I didn't realize those were the edited posts! Thank you for your hard work!

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GNU Terry Pratchett

They're here!

Sent from my SM-G965U1 using Tapatalk

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"Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not;
and oftentimes we call a man cold when he is only sad." ~Robert C. Savage

They have been... dealt with.

*rubs hands thoughtfully*

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Melkor and Ungoliant in need of some relationship counselling.

*Cackles wickedly*

Sent from my SM-G965U1 using Tapatalk

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"Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not;
and oftentimes we call a man cold when he is only sad." ~Robert C. Savage

At least Jude got to have fun.

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GNU Terry Pratchett

This new one, "ertooso", is either a highly-sophisticated bot, or a lowly-paid minion that combs through websites and pretends to post relevant replies and then returns a few days later and edits the post to post spammy links. On its first post, in the Emigrated thread, I actually wondered if it was a member who had lost their login information. I visited the thread later, and found that the post had been edited to promote their link. Then the same thing happened in the Star Trek thread in Made in Dale. If you read the original version of the post, it was actually plausible in context. Now, it's been completely rewritten to promote their spammy link.

If it is a bot, the AI is strong with this one. It may even pass the Turing test.

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Melkor and Ungoliant in need of some relationship counselling.

Good effort but I don't think it had to be all that sophisticated. It just had to find a topic header related to a particular subject and then post a canned test snippet.

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GNU Terry Pratchett