I've noticed a sharp uptick in the number of news users registering per day in the last week and a half - from about one user every two days to over thirty or forty new users per day. Clearly, spambots were to blame; we got up to over 800 users, but I just deleted roughly 400 bot accounts, making the total user count a bit more accurate at 409 users. I shall probably be carrying out this process more regularly, and perhaps implementing some more anti-bot measures. Among the patterns I noticed were that many bots register with a first and last name separated by a space, and most fill out the interests and website url part of the profile but nothing else. I'm considering a system to weigh the overall danger it sees in each new user and suspend suspected new accounts. This would allow an admin to review and delete or unsuspend the suspected accounts. Feedback is, as always, appreciated in the accompanying discussion topic.

why not just get around to adding some of the registration protection that people have been asking you to do? Such as the image recognition that elf (I think) had were it asks you to name the animal or whatever in the picture?

Having an account be pre-suspended just on the statistical probability that its a bot is ridiculous

Ridiculous? If I could hone it carefully enough to follow bot patterns, it would be completely transparent to users and quite effective for mass-monitoring of registration.

unless A) There is no definitive bot pattern, or B) a user registers with the same information style as a bot, or C) An admin screws up and deletes a valid user who was pending verification. Not to mention that if a user IS stuck waiting for verification, how long is that going to take for them to get accepted? And how is an admin going to be able to definitively tell whether its a bot or a user?

So yes, its ridiculous

Hmm... Why not have a form with questions?? This is a TI related forum, ask a couple quick questions about calcs, some addition problems, and something simple stupid. That would be the best way to deter bots, would it not??

Sure, that sounds like a good idea. The only thing (and I know some of you disagree with me on this) is that I want to make the bot filtration process as transparent as possible to legitimate users.

Which a questionare would do, wouldn't it?? Granted, you cannot make the questions on when a president in Russia was in service, but random math questions should be easy... Heck, I could even get php to do that... lol

Oh, it would certainly do, but I still want it to be as easy as possible for new users to join. I guess I could just put my worries about it aside and bite the bullet...

/me points to my questionaire which can't be handled by OCR at this point.

I seriously doubt the phpBB spambots are sophisticated enough to do OCR on math problems...

once they know its there (aka 40-50 failed registrations a day) all they have to do is add a quick equation parser to the current OCR algorithm (as in about 2 minutes of regex work for a decent coder)

Oh, I know that's not a good idea. I'm still trying to think of a creative solution...

/me points to my MOD again....

Yup yup, ik about that. I'm still exploring all my options.

ok, lets look at the stats, we have a ton a spambots here, where SFGP has what, very few to none?

how about you make a image with the math problem, it would make it harder, then also add an additional layer beyond that

But there's a huge degree more links to Cemetech out there than to SFGP, imho.

0 since I made my mod, and except for once when I accidentally enabled Guest posting...

just do elf's mod already - whats the problem with it? Try it, and if it doesn't work, then do something else. If a user can't figure it out during registration, then that user shouldn't be here anyway. Its not going to be a big hassle for anyone wanting to register

Scan each user's first X posts for advertising, pron links etc. Suspicious accounts can be flagged/temporarily suspended until an admin approves it.
http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=54677#54677
Like this one.