Of Spam, Robots, and Captchas

**Tue Jan 24, 2006 10:02 pm**

All - A small change has been made today that will officially make life more difficult for Guest posters, people registering, and spam robots.

Over the last week or so the number of spam posts has become a real problem (somewhere around five a day, or ~5% of the posts). These spam posts are made by "robots" that post via the guest account. While the Janitors and I have been doing our best to keep up with them, we're not real thrilled with having to do it (both removing the posts and the banning of their IP addresses).

So - starting today a "captcha" mechanism has been put in place for Guest posts and for new registrations. This mechanism will present Guests and new registrants with a graphic containing six somewhat obscured characters, and will require that they accurately transcribe these letters into a text box in order to actually post the message.

I'm sorry to have to do this. This is, unfortunately, the best option short of requiring all users to register before they are able to post (an option that the PMs and I agree sucks). So - sorry for making things more difficult, Guests. Please don't hold it against us, and kindly thank any spammers you meet by kicking them squarely in the nut-sack.

**Tue Jan 24, 2006 10:05 pm**

Captcha. Captcha. CAPTCHA. I like the sound of that word. Thanks!

**Tue Feb 28, 2006 8:14 pm**

Hey-ho DzM, thanks fer letting me join yer forum. I SWEAR I'll try an' be a good fella.
I think the CAPTCHA is a great idea for stopping spam. In the spirit of things why not us my handly little acronym - Friendly User Check Keeping Yez Alright - as this is what it says to the wee goimbín spampushers. I'z plan to visit yer site as often as life permits, 'cause it seems like a place of like-minded souls cruising on 'Das Knarrenschiff' someher in the Sargasso.
Safe home,
FINTAN

**Sat Apr 08, 2006 7:52 pm**

spam is lovely meat

**Sat Jun 03, 2006 7:46 am**

To keep you kids abreast of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans going on around here:

Over the last three days (roughly) Zuzana, MacRua and I have caught, banned, and removed around 50 or so spam messages. This particular bot (or people, or persons) is clever and works around captcha, time stamps, and signatures required to post a message as guest AND it rarely re-uses the same IP address, so we had our hands full doing this.

This morning (Pacific Standard Time) I was able to put into place another countermeasure that, with luck, you will likely never directly see. Sadly though no countermeasure is ever completely foolproof. If any of you ever feel the need to discuss penis-enhancement, college-webcams, ambien, and around 27 other topics you will be confronted with a message telling you that you're a bad person. Sorry about that.

I now return you to the more pressing concerns of the day.

**Sat Jun 03, 2006 8:16 am**

I have noticed the amount latley - it feels like theres been lots more since you put in the password thingy!

I can't imagine how frustrating these spammers must be!

BASTARDS!

**Tue Jun 06, 2006 8:42 pm**

complicated stuff DZM, its easy to forget all the work you do behind the scenes, so whilst i am thinking about it, Thank You Loads , maybe see you in England at Xmas ?

**Tue Jun 06, 2006 9:15 pm**

rumsodomyandthelash wrote:complicated stuff DZM, its easy to forget all the work you do behind the scenes, so whilst i am thinking about it, Thank You Loads , maybe see you in England at Xmas ?

You're very welcome.

It can sometimes be frustrating (the spam battling that is), but it's also kind of fun. It's a puzzle to be broken. A game to be won. Nothing so complex as chess - more like a mixture of chess and checkers, but with shifting rules that you have to adapt to as the game goes on. Sometimes you're in the lead, sometimes you're not. Sometimes you think you're doing really well only to discover that some wanker lied when they said "The queen piece only moves one space at a time."

Anyway - It can be annoying, but it's fun too. I think our PMs deserve more sympathy - they have to deal with more of the actual grunt work of dealing with the spam while I get to play around with figuring out how to kill the latest attack.

Dunno if I'll be going to England or not. Depends entirely on whether The Company (All Praise The Company) still needs my services in a few months (it has been announced that there will be an 11-13% Reduction In Force over the next six months), and whether I can find a plausible excuse to have The Company (All Praise The company) pay for me to be in the UK for a week or two in early/mid December.

UPDATE: I should also mention that the spammer mentioned a few posts above is a bot that uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract the confirmation codes from the Captcha image. That's how it was able to proceed so effectively. While the spam-words filter is still active, this particular bot has been thwarted by my mangling the Captcha image in a non-standard (for phpBB systems) way. The image should still be pretty legible to people, but will be very difficult for OCR to read. So far the change has been 100% effective and we've had no new spam posts in the last 48 hours (roughly).

Sorry guests - it's now just a little bit harder to post. Please to be giving any spammer you should meet a swift kick in the nut-sack as a "Thank You," and remember that registered users don't have to deal with the Captcha crap.

**Tue Jun 06, 2006 11:34 pm**

i dont understand how spamming is effective
when one sees a spam post, all he can do is hate the spammer
and make a sinister vow to eliminate it's existence

seriously though, how do they possibly make money?

**Tue Jun 06, 2006 11:55 pm**

Benno wrote:i dont understand how spamming is effective
when one sees a spam post, all he can do is hate the spammer
and make a sinister vow to eliminate it's existence

seriously though, how do they possibly make money?

Different spammers have different goals. Most BB spam falls into "Search Engine Optimization" though. Their target isn't you. Their target is somebody searching Google. Works like this:
<ol><li>It is widely believed that that Google's page ranking algorithm favors pages with more links to them than pages with fewer links. So two pages with identical content, "A" with one link to it and "B" with a thousand links to it - the theory is that "B" will get a higher page rank than "A"<li>Most BB installations are not well protected/updated/modified by the person or people that run them, so it's a trivial task to add pages of "content" to them that have links back to the spammer page<li>Once your URLs are introduced to many sites Google's bot's will think these are legitimate links rather<li>Somebody legitimately search for Viagara, or Web Cam, or Hotels In Frankfurt will see the spammer's page in the Google results because of the huge number of sites now linking to them</ol>It doesn't take many people to act on their being the highest ranked site to make the whole thing financially viable. A grand or two of investment is pretty cheap to acquire the technology, and it costs nearly nothing to push a bot to hammer thousands of web sites.

Spam in your mail is a slightly different business model, but not by much.

The problem is that The Internet is largely designed and built on trust of one's peers. The protocols are designed to make it easy for computers to talk to eachother. Unfortunately there's a lot of dickheads in the world that see this as an opportunity to be exploited rather than a valuable ethos and resource to be protected. These are the same fuckjobs that send your FAX machine incessant advertisements, and see no problem with ringing you at 20:00.

**Tue Jun 13, 2006 11:03 am**

Seems to be holding up pretty well...

Here's to the next challenge being a long way off, Boss. Glad to read your Zen approach to it all...
Also hope you get 'sent' to the UK by The Company(All Hail The Company!), and all at the The Company's (All Hail The Company!) expense, too.

**Sat Aug 12, 2006 11:46 pm**

Eric V wrote:Captcha. Captcha. CAPTCHA. I like the sound of that word. Thanks!

SPAM ROBOTS - Them Feckers!!! They get into my website guestbook too!!!!

I hate them FECKERS!!! :evil:

**Thu Feb 28, 2008 3:46 pm**

Just curious, what are the Google, Yahoo and MSN Bots that are listed with the logged on users?

**Thu Feb 28, 2008 4:39 pm**

Mike from Boston wrote:Just curious, what are the Google, Yahoo and MSN Bots that are listed with the logged on users?

Each of those companies have spiders or bots (these are just jargon names for automated software that crawl the content of web sites) that index content for their search engines. When you see them listed at the bottom of the page, that means that within the last five minutes that spider/bot was indexing our output for inclusion into their search engine.

**Thu Feb 28, 2008 5:01 pm**

DzM wrote:
Mike from Boston wrote:Just curious, what are the Google, Yahoo and MSN Bots that are listed with the logged on users?

Each of those companies have spiders or bots (these are just jargon names for automated software that crawl the content of web sites) that index content for their search engines. When you see them listed at the bottom of the page, that means that within the last five minutes that spider/bot was indexing our output for inclusion into their search engine.

Thanks DZM

Of Spam, Robots, and Captchas

Of Spam, Robots, and Captchas

Just a "So's you know"

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