AI bot spam on the forum

[Guest]

It's getting out of control. Is it possible to do something about it?

[Stan`]

No, not really.

[Atrik]

I don't like the idea of impairing normal user experience of the forum/starting arm race against bots but maybe make a user's first post on forum to be approved by a moderator?

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Stan` said:

No, not really.

That's unfortunate, but still honest and straight to the point.

Thanks.

[Genava55]

1 hour ago, Atrik said:

I don't like the idea of impairing normal user experience of the forum/starting arm race against bots but maybe make a user's first post on forum to be approved by a moderator?

 

[Seleucids]

There are no bots, only humans posters. There is an industry where humans are paid to spam post forums and group chats with advertisements of products. This is exactly the nature of the spams: they always advertise merchandise. Therefore, all anti-bot measures will be completely ineffective. 

We should find ways to limit the number of accounts each human can make.

[Grautvornix]

Absolutely!

I also like the idea to restrict the first 5 posts of a new account so to not allow posting a link. Certainly, humans (paid spammers) will be able to circumvent that, but it will be a bit more effort for them.

In the end we might even be forced to train an AI agent to detect advertisement and propose posts for removal to a moderator. I believe humans are pretty quick at assessing these once the messages were pre-assessed.

[ShadowOfHassen]

Honestly, if we can just require the first forum post to have to be approved by a moderator, that would work.

 

Another idea is to get proper privileges on the Ubuntu discourse forum I had to click through a MASSIVE tutorial-- something like that might help too.

[Classic-Burger]

Funny, I like how they don't know the context yet. They're going by the title, and it's about a different game.

[Perzival12]

The five main ways to detect a bot:

#1: They highlight proper nouns to seemingly make their point.

#2: They post something barely, if not completely unrelated to the topic. How do you make coffee? With MagiCoff!

#3: They have names like real people, like this, JasonHawken28. No one else has a name that makes sense without explanation.

#4: They always have a link to their website, for proper advertising.

#5: They post once, then disappear forever, never to be seen again…

[vladislavbelov]

2 hours ago, Perzival12 said:

No one else has a name that makes sense without explanation.

Excuse me 

 

[Classic-Burger]

19 minutes ago, vladislavbelov said:

Excuse me 

 

Anglo-Saxon names, that is, American and British names, or names from former British colonies.

[Genava55]

@feneur@Stan`

A lot of bots currently logged

 

Edited May 15 by Genava55

[Dunedan]

You can be glad you don't see the amount of spam they're trying to post.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I delete a hundred spam posts per month probably.

[Stan`]

Finally got rid of all their posts.

[Stan`]

They already did, twice.

[s0600204]

Heh, just got home from work, start up computer... and 372 email notifications (from across a 6hr 21min time-span) about posts from various users with usernames starting "888starz".

Hope they're at least being paid well if they're that persistent.

Anyhow, keep up the good work; and thanks to everyone who reports spam! _{(Everyone who posts it can <redacted>.)}

 

[hyperion]

22 hours ago, Genava55 said:

@feneur@Stan`

A lot of bots currently logged

 

That's me deleting about a 100 spam posts. Definitively the most obnoxious bot I came across so far.

[s0600204]

And it started up again, this time with accounts starting "Administrator_" sending PMs to users, purporting to be from WildfireGames, with a scam link.

(Needless to say: if we could afford to give out free iPads to people, we could also afford better servers to run the code repository and CI systems on...)

[Asher]

I got that also, does the site have a CAPTCHA or something setup for when someone is making an account?

[Genava55]

11 minutes ago, Asher said:

I got that also, does the site have a CAPTCHA or something setup for when someone is making an account?

It seems to be in place:

 

[feneur]

I’ve disabled PMs for new users. I would have preferred not to, but I think it’s more important to protect people from scammers than to make things convenient for new users.

Maybe we should require posts from new users to be checked by moderators before posting. But I am less certain about that. It’s basically the same amount of work for moderating the forums (maybe a bit more, but not much), but I think it would be quite a bit more inconvenient for actual new users, especially if they come here to get help with the game and then they don’t see their post. I feel like that would be frustrating.

[Genava55]

13 minutes ago, Asher said:

I got that also, does the site have a CAPTCHA or something setup for when someone is making an account?

The biggest issue with captcha is the audio workaround to validate the captcha. 

[Asher]

8 minutes ago, Genava55 said:

The biggest issue with captcha is the audio workaround to validate the captcha. 

If we did an image one, I don't think we would have that problem