3 replies to this topic

[John1352]

I just noticed a spambot in the new player forum, and realized that the messages were almost identical to ones I have seen before, on another free to play game forum. Based on the player responses to the spambot, and that I haven't seen them before here, I am assuming that they are not common here.

There are clearly some systems in place to combat these spambots already (post limits), but if this is all that is being used, I strongly recommend other measures are taken. The other forums that I saw this happening on got completely flooded by them, each day there would be TENS OF THOUSANDS of posts from many different spambot accounts and the admins/moderators had to spend a lot of time deleting them (even when deleting an account and all its posts in one click).

It looks extremely unprofessional to have a forum full of spambots, and will hurt sales. If you already have tools that can detect them and delete all their posts automatically based on contents, use them, otherwise, get onto it quickly.

(if this is commonly dealt with and this spambot is just an exception that will be fixed, you can probably ignore this post, otherwise, act quickly, better to spend a week implementing spam filters than a month trying to delete all the spam then a week implementing spam filters)

[Gauvan]

It looks like we have a recurring spambot. Might I suggest a service like http://www.stopforumspam.com? They have plugins for several types of board software.

I just checked and it looks like there isn't even a captcha for account creation. Might I suggest an image based captcha as the text-based versions can be defeated with OCR software.

Edited by Gauvan, 19 December 2014 - 08:44 AM.

[Rogue Jedi]

yes, a similar set of 5 posts have been showing up in new player help a few times a week for at least the past month, each time it seems to be from a different username

[Egomane]

As far as I know, they are looking into ways to improve the situation.

Today is the worst I have seen so far, in regards to spambots. I must have reported about half a dozen of them and I'm sure I missed some, that got reported by others. At least most of the bots and their posts get removed quickly.