Most we can do at this point is report the posts. We all could however, all get together and pester Harley until she dose something.
No clue. But I'd prolly pester Halrey to give Mods the ability to ban bots. That would make it easier, unless you CANT ban people :c
We can ban bots. I've lost count of how many bots I've banned during my time as moderator, it's a large number. What we further could do to prevent them from coming in here, is adding more stuff to the security of creating an account. To do that, you need to be moderator. We're working on making this possible for me and Aaron. I just want to mention, by the way, that Harley has in fact made some good changes and added a good bit of new stuff after buying the forum from Luster
If you don't mind, I'd like to make a suggestion One of the old forums I used to post on had a rule where for your first 10 posts, you had to answer a question (A fox jumped over a dog. What did the fox jump over?). Unless you provided the right answer, the post was denied. That would stop spam bots and any leftover spam and advertising would be from human users.
Although that would probably be a bit weird and annoying for new users, that's a pretty good idea We did try to make a user have to post at least five posts (or something like that) before being allowed to post a thread, but that only made the spambots post posts first and then their threads, which was even more annoying. I really don't understand how spambots work, how are they so intelligent? Are someone controlling them? I know they've been programmed, but how can they put together a puzzle of six different pictures with their mousepointer? (Like the one we have upon registering to this forum).
Spam bots can be programmed to be pretty darn smart skaara, some can even get past 4 different catcha at once
Yea, I see your point. But 10 posts go quick. The spam and advertising on the forums were so low, a mod was needed more for stopping flaming wars than they were needed for spammers and advertisers.
Maybe you are the greatest potential customer, according to their info that they MIGHT have gotten through google! :O I honestly dont know. Bad timing. Also, bots probably work in a manner as algorithms and javascrip codes, which means they are bound to do certain things. They cant think for themselves, but the scripts and codes makes them LOOK smart.
If I could have a little box with a button in my hand right now that would explode all computer-sources in the world where Spambots purposely come from, with the guarantee that nobody would be injured from the explosions, I'd hit that button before you'd be able to say spam. Anyway, I'm gonna let you all in on something most of you probably didn't already know. When we get rid of the spam in this forum and everything else we might get rid of, we don't delete it; we move it to the Trash Bin forum, which is only visible for the moderators and administrators. We've never deleted the contents there. Maybe two to three pages, like.... three times? That forum now has 1,145 threads, and most of those threads are many threads merged(put together) into one thread. It now has 2,661 posts, so there are averagely more than two threads in each thread, if you know what I mean. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that that forum now takes up a lot of space, and this forum does not have eternally of that. We all know text doesn't take much space in itself, but when the text is in such huge ammount, it is a lot. With that, you can count many links, which takes even more space, in each and every post. There are also even pictures in some of them, especially the newer Movie-illegal-download-links-spam. When this forum began getting slower, it was a slow process; it didn't just suddenly happen. I believe and hope that deleting the Trash Bin will help this out a little. Not very much considering how many threads and posts there are in the other forums. But some. Hopefully noticeably. So I will do that now, then make a new Trash Bin. The Admin-program-help says I can just empty it, but I can't find out how. :noidea:
Yes holy balls! I just found out that spambots can have profile picture (this is probably old news to you). I found a minefield of them here: http://www.lastlightforum.com/calendar.php?do=getinfo&day=2013-6-10&c=1. Careful where you tread .
