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        riddles >> general problem-solving / chatting / whatever >> 10,000th Member
        
(Message started by: ThudanBlunder on Sep 19th, 2007, 4:39pm)
Title: 10,000th Member
Post by ThudanBlunder on Sep 19th, 2007, 4:39pm
The number of members has just passed 10000. In fact, the number of members has increased by 300 in the last couple of days! This ought to be a cause for celebration, yet something fishy is going on. There are almost 1000 members with names of the form newxxx@gmail.com, where x represents a digit and there are more that 500 members with names of the form nowxxx@gmail.com. In fact, now510@gmail.com was the 10000th member. What is more, none of these members ever post anything. And all of these 1500+ members seem to have joined in the last two weeks! Is a robot at work here?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by Sameer on Sep 19th, 2007, 5:28pm
Yea, I bet this is a bot!! We probably should include a authentic signature for signing up on the forum.. This would probably require immediate attention from William.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by ThudanBlunder on Sep 19th, 2007, 5:34pm

on 09/19/07 at 17:28:58, Sameer wrote:
This would probably require immediate attention from William.

Yeah, these pseudo-members are probably wasting William's precious server resources.
Five new 'members' have joined in the last hour. But what is the point in it?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by JiNbOtAk on Sep 19th, 2007, 5:52pm
Adding authentic signature is a good move, but what do we do with these xxx-bots ?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by srn347 on Sep 19th, 2007, 6:08pm
Why do anything? They aren't causing any harm. Other than the server limit. But users cannot be deleted, so we must find the source any get it to stop.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by srn347 on Sep 19th, 2007, 10:08pm
Really? Before doing so, someone should interogate him. I will.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by Sameer on Sep 19th, 2007, 10:28pm

on 09/19/07 at 22:08:45, srn347 wrote:
Really? Before doing so, someone should interogate him. I will.


bots like these are not easily dealt with except for making the server side code more robust!! Unless of course the person is dumb enough to run from the same machine!!
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by srn347 on Sep 19th, 2007, 10:35pm
Who would do this and why?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by Sir Col on Sep 20th, 2007, 12:13am
The reason they do this is to obtain publicity for their product/website. What these bots are programmed to do is to register and add a signature with a link to the owner's website. As this forum is very popular it is regularly indexed by the major search engines and they trawl all of the links from the main page, including the members page. One security measure easily implemented is to not allow signatures to be added until the member has made, say, ten posts, and ensure it is removed from the registration form. A script could be easily crafted so that if the registrant submits a signature then it must be a bot trying to register and the registration process can be terminated.

However, these annoying bots are also programmed to make posts which contain links. This is much more difficult to guard against.

Hence the most effective method is getting a human response during registration. This is sometimes achieved by getting the user to perform some random calculation, answer some trivia question, but often done by getting the user to enter the code embeddd in an image, called CAPTCHA. Unfortunately most of the bot engines - and, yes, creating these is big business - at the moment have work arounds for the standard CAPTCHA systems. A customised system is the best way forward here.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by towr on Sep 20th, 2007, 1:00am
None of these accounts seem to link to a website though. If they have a link in their signature, it doesn't show up anywhere without them posting.
The only thing they're doing is taking up a little bit of server space, but even that shouldn't be much.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by srn347 on Sep 20th, 2007, 7:10am
Someone should delete them though.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by rmsgrey on Sep 20th, 2007, 7:29am

on 09/20/07 at 01:00:35, towr wrote:
None of these accounts seem to link to a website though. If they have a link in their signature, it doesn't show up anywhere without them posting.
The only thing they're doing is taking up a little bit of server space, but even that shouldn't be much.

member profiles?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by towr on Sep 20th, 2007, 7:53am

on 09/20/07 at 07:29:45, rmsgrey wrote:
member profiles?
I don't see people's signatures under member profiles. And I don't recall any settings under my profile that might make that different. Do you see them?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by srn347 on Sep 20th, 2007, 4:23pm
By authentic signature, do you mean one of those image things where they can't copy and paste it? By the way, if you can't see their sig, how do you know that it's a link?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by JiNbOtAk on Sep 20th, 2007, 5:45pm

on 09/20/07 at 00:13:42, Sir Col wrote:
As this forum is very popular ..


Really ? Didn't notice.  :P

Actually, how many members could William's account support ?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by Roy on Sep 20th, 2007, 7:10pm
Well, i suppose only William would know that, but, how long has it been since anyone has seen him onlline, let alone post?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by ThudanBlunder on Sep 20th, 2007, 7:29pm
120 new members a day, one every 12 minutes!
Is srn347 making contingency plans?  
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by srn347 on Sep 20th, 2007, 8:01pm
Contingency? Anyway, they'll always stick out like a sore thumb by not posting, and having a name that seems like a robot's creation.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by Robots Creation 10110101 on Sep 20th, 2007, 9:16pm

on 09/20/07 at 20:01:09, srn347 wrote:
Contingency? Anyway, they'll always stick out like a sore thumb by not posting, and having a name that seems like robot's creation.


HEY, THAT'S OFFENSIVE!!!  :P
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by srn347 on Sep 20th, 2007, 10:36pm
Sorry, perhaps I should of had the word a, or something. You don't need to YELL though. Did you just morph your name from robot's creation 101011010100110100 to mikedagr 8?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by mikedagr8 on Oct 4th, 2007, 3:56am
Just a thought...

Our member count is now below 10K. What happened?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by SMQ on Oct 4th, 2007, 4:05am
William has been cleaning up the massive numbers of [fake-address]@gmail.com accounts.

--SMQ
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by Ghost Sniper on Oct 9th, 2007, 10:16am

on 10/04/07 at 04:05:07, SMQ wrote:
William has been cleaning up the massive numbers of [fake-address]@gmail.com accounts.

--SMQ


I believe that he should add something to help protect the site from auto-registration. What I'm thinking is using what a lot of other sites do for registration, and that is having a picture with letters and numbers in it, and then having the person registering type in the characters. It won't hinder people who want to register, but it would stop spambots from registering.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by SMQ on Oct 9th, 2007, 10:25am
It's called a CAPTCHA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha), and I guess there are software issues preventing one from being implemented here in the near future.  Longer term I'm sure some similar system will be instituted.

--SMQ
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by towr on Oct 9th, 2007, 11:29am
Before the last update the forum did, for a while, have that. But it wasn't compatible with that upgrade.

Also, spam-software can now crack many of those CAPTCHA's, so they don't help all that much anymore.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by Aryabhatta on Oct 9th, 2007, 12:03pm
In the spirit of this site, perhaps we can just ask a simple puzzle before registration is allowed.

(Edit: I see that CAPTCHA covers asking puzzles etc. Sorry, I thought it was only about images)
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by ThudanBlunder on Oct 10th, 2007, 10:18am
William claims that guest access has been denied.
Why then are there now 22 guests online?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by towr on Oct 10th, 2007, 10:50am

on 10/10/07 at 10:18:49, ThudanBlunder wrote:
William claims that guest access has been denied.
Why then are there now 22 guests online?
One) they're also guests when they only look at the "only registered members can view this forum" page
Two) I don't think guest access is denied any more.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by DC1E2L on Oct 15th, 2007, 1:26am

on 10/10/07 at 10:50:17, towr wrote:
Two) I don't think guest access is denied any more.

How do you access a guest pass? What does it comprise of? Is it only when looking at the forums and you are not logged in, does it apply you as a guest?

I just saw, and there are still about 400 nowXXX@gmail.com accounts. Scary.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by towr on Oct 15th, 2007, 2:24am

on 10/15/07 at 01:26:19, DC1E2L wrote:
Is it only when looking at the forums and you are not logged in
yes.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by Sameer on Oct 15th, 2007, 2:24pm
Uh oh.. look what the bot is doing at other forums:

http://www.forkinhand.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=4
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by DC1E2L on Oct 15th, 2007, 2:26pm
So they are spam bots, yet they are not posting here...
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by Sameer on Oct 15th, 2007, 2:32pm

on 10/15/07 at 14:26:51, DC1E2L wrote:
So they are spam bots, yet they are not posting here...


The person who is running it probably has intention of hacking this. You still seem to be undergoing identity crisis, I see.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by DC1E2L on Oct 15th, 2007, 2:38pm

on 10/15/07 at 14:32:35, Sameer wrote:
The person who is running it probably has intention of hacking this. You still seem to be undergoing identity crisis, I see.

Ahah, gotchas... You are incorrect here.
Refer to here (reply #122) (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=riddles_general;action=display;num=1033780880;start=100#100) ;)
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by towr on Oct 16th, 2007, 12:14am

on 10/15/07 at 14:26:51, DC1E2L wrote:
So they are spam bots, yet they are not posting here...
Probably this board is incompatible with the way they are coded.


on 10/15/07 at 14:32:35, Sameer wrote:
The person who is running it probably has intention of hacking this.
I don't think the hacking of that board and the spam are related; other than in the sense that that board is dead and has no one looking after it to fix either problem.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by Ghost Sniper on Oct 17th, 2007, 11:21am
Hey cool. The newest member (at least last time I checked) was not a "nowXXX@gmail.com" account.  :P

I say that we IP-ban the computer that's coughing up all the "nowXXX@gmail.com" accounts.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by mikedagr8 on Oct 29th, 2007, 10:50pm

on 10/17/07 at 11:21:08, Ghost Sniper wrote:
I say that we IP-ban the computer that's coughing up all the "nowXXX@gmail.com" accounts.

Just an observation, but the bots seem to be back... :o I think IP ban would be appropriate here, if it is possible. :-/
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by towr on Oct 30th, 2007, 2:15am
I doubt it's coming from one computer. And even if it were, there's a good chance the owner of the computer it's coming from doesn't know his computer is used for this.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by temporary on Jan 25th, 2008, 7:04am
Image verification would stop them dead in their tracks.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by mikedagr8 on Jan 25th, 2008, 1:43pm

on 01/25/08 at 07:04:11, temporary wrote:
Image verification would stop them dead in their tracks.

If you are talking about CAPTCHA, then read the previous page.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by temporary on Jan 25th, 2008, 8:34pm
Then why have we not done that yet?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by Icarus on Jan 25th, 2008, 8:41pm
Because "We" actually means "Wu", and William has his own limitations on time and resources.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by william wu on Nov 5th, 2008, 8:33pm
Sorry for being so lazy  :-[

I wrote a script and 6,636 users which I think are probably fake were killed today. Attached is the deathlist.

Lately the bots have been getting really bad, so I will look into implementing some kind of CAPTCHA.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by towr on Nov 6th, 2008, 12:23am
You could also consider using the lists and APIs from http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ or http://www.stopforumspam.com/ to identify likely bots and comment spammers.


We don't seem to get a lot of spam though, so it's not too bad in that sense. Maybe to weed out more fake registrations, you could send an activation-email to accounts with 0 posts and high-entropy names, then delete them after a week.
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by iono on Nov 6th, 2008, 4:58pm
don't we have verification e-mails?
Title: Re: 10,000th Member
Post by towr on Nov 7th, 2008, 12:29am

on 11/06/08 at 16:58:32, iono wrote:
don't we have verification e-mails?
I can't remember. But in any case, spam bots have absolutely no problem reading and acting on verification emails. They expect them on registration.
If, however, you were to repeat it a month later, spam accounts are unlikely to respond (nor have they any motivation to, since they rarely use an account to spam for prolonged periods; they'd sooner register over and over). So you could use it to weed them out.


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