These guys who keep putting stuff in sections are getting annoying. So I thought we could lock all sections except, say...Introduction.

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Jon, Squire of Lord Ex.

Gods I love that title.

then they will post spam in the introsection!

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No, because they are bots. they are programmed to spam in certain sections.

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Jon, Squire of Lord Ex.

Gods I love that title.

O, didn't know that

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Do you mean lock all the posts? So we can't post on them either?


Please, enlighten me. ^^

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I once visited a forum where u could not post in certain areas without being a member.

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Jon, Squire of Lord Ex.

Gods I love that title.

oooh...only members can post. I thought you ment lock them so NO-ONE could post. Heh.

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When Embossed and his/her friends trolled the forum a few weeks ago their damage was limited by the 10 posts per day limit. They weren't very bright as they could have posted as guest(which doesn't have such limit) in any forum. A week later s/he came back and posted while using another nick, I didn't really wanted to see how much time they would take to realize the "guest" user flaw in the system so I made every section available to registered users only.

Between then and now a bot was released that was able to OCR the visual confirmation (captcha) image used to prevent spambots from posting on the board.

So far, some bots are indeed coded to preferably spam in general/test/everything-else forum as their posts are likely to last longer than in a forum with a clear topic. However, if they are not able to post in these general forums, they can and will probably spam anywhere else they can since those people make money if they can put as many link as possible on as many board as possible in order for search engines to put their website at the top of the list. There are few incentives to have a bot spamming in moderation.

To prevent this problem, I made the captcha image more difficult to identify for OCR programs.

<center><table><tr><td align="center"><font><tt>The old image

</td>
<td align="center"><font><tt>The new image

</td></tr></table></center>

Note that B and 8 are similar and difficult to see, but B has a clear vertical line on the left of the letter. Since this captcha is not a standard phpBB feature, bots should be blocked. I have put the permissions on the General forum to allow guests to create new topics so that current spambots can try to break the visual confirmation. If they can't I will allow guest users on all forums but now, the only thing I am not sure of is if I am blocking real people as well.

If you have some free time, try to preview a few anonymous posts in the general forum and tell me if you can identify correctly the visual confirmation (you choose to only preview your post; it won't be added to the board but you will still know if you have entered the right code or not).

Yessir!

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Jon, Squire of Lord Ex.

Gods I love that title.

well, it is harder, and i had a bit of difficulty, but look what just happened! Chh. Technology is just gonna get better and better, and THIS is whats gonna happen. its gonna be impossible to stop them.

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Jon, Squire of Lord Ex.

Gods I love that title.

This post purpose is to count the amount of spam that managed to get through the new visual confirmation.

Note that some people are actually paid to manually post spam all day so from one side I will count the number of spam message and on the other I will count the number of spammer who register (and advertise in the "Website" section of their profile). Usually a human spammer will not register if they can post their message in a forum so this will tell me if the new captcha is doing a good job or not.

<tt><b>From June 13th 2006 to June 24th 2006, there was:
Number of spam message: 10
Number of spammer registration: 0</b></tt>

List:
1- Tue Jun 13, 2006 6:32 pm, splitcam2008, 82.210.128.9
2- Tue Jun 13, 2006 9:36 pm, Peter, 74.52.20.130
3- Thu Jun 15, 2006 5:30 pm, Romkos-kusto, 84.19.181.92
4- Sun Jun 18, 2006 11:33 am, splitcam2008, 202.58.86.3
5- Wed Jun 21, 2006 1:50 pm, Kellinom, 74.52.20.130
6- Wed Jun 21, 2006 3:50 pm, Burraccuda-LCD, 84.19.185.156
7- Fri Jun 23, 2006 7:06 am, Dennisyika, 61.40.189.91
8- Fri Jun 23, 2006 5:43 am, Julianno, 222.119.50.248
9- Sat Jun 24, 2006 4:27 am, tm4free, 200.25.187.222
10- Sat Jun 24, 2006 6:13 am, MedVedODJoG, 194.165.130.93