SMF Development > Feature Requests

Is There a Real Anti-Spam-Bot Strategy Being Worked On?

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busterone:
There never will be a completely dependable anti-spam method. As said before, for every new prevention method created, money is poured into a way to bypass it.  Banning by IP is pointless, considering that most spambot masters continually change and rotate IPs and use proxies, etc. When IPv6 is completely up and active, there will be an endless supply of more IPs for them to use. Banning will be a complete waste of time.
The simplest method is anti-spam verification questions that are unique and possibly pertain to your forum's subject or theme. Those using the botware can program in answers to questions, but when they are multiple and unique, they will not bother to even try.  There will always be the human spammers out there that can and will answer the questions, but only if they are too easy to solve. A layered approach is essential.  I use the questions, Project Honeypot, and Stop Spammer. In most cases, if they are already in the Project Honeypot db, they never even reach the registration process. If they are not, then the bulk of those never make it past the questions. The few that make it past the questions are humans, and most of them do not pass Stop Spammer. I get an actual registrant to make it through all the defenses about once every 3 or 4 months. 

It also helps to regularly change your questions. In the event that a human spammer makes it through, they often communicate to others about which sites to target. The answers can easily be shared on their network to be programmed into the bots for a particular site. Changing them or rotating them regularly will hinder their efforts. The dumb ones will continue to come over and over with no success, but the smarter ones will move on to easier pickings.   

ForumGuy789:
Ya, woke up with 7 pages of errors this morning.
"Sorry XXXXXXX, you are banned from using this forum!"

So I guess I'll be turning off the Error log again.

Illori:
that is not really an error it is an alert, and it is related to you having people on your ban list trying to access your forum. that would happen on any smf forum that has this happen.

ForumGuy789:

--- Quote from: Illori on September 22, 2011, 10:40:55 AM ---that is not really an error it is an alert, and it is related to you having people on your ban list trying to access your forum. that would happen on any smf forum that has this happen.

--- End quote ---

Wow, I almost knew someone would say this - because I remember someone saying this to another user here.

I realize it's not a true error.. that it is an alert. But it doesn't change the fact that it makes finding any REAL errors completely impossible, because you have to find them in pages and pages of worthless alerts. Therefore error log file = worthless.

青山 素子:

--- Quote from: ForumGuy789 on September 22, 2011, 11:11:20 AM ---I realize it's not a true error.. that it is an alert. But it doesn't change the fact that it makes finding any REAL errors completely impossible, because you have to find them in pages and pages of worthless alerts. Therefore error log file = worthless.

--- End quote ---

If you're running 2.0, just choose the "Critical" filter. That will only show severe problems that have been logged or potential security issues like failed admin access attempts. It's not the best solution, but it does work for now.

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