05-17-2011, 09:08 AM
Eyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. I should really visit RR more often. Anyway, I had this same problem to a degree over at ACU. Bunch of bots were registering every week or so and spamming all over and such. There was a pretty easy fix I thought up completely at random once I got tired of banning accounts, but I don't know if it'll work for you guys or not.
Anyway, what I did was I added a custom profile field that was mandatory to fill in upon registration. I also added in another feature, but that wasn't so important really. The field that was mandatory to fill in was the real kick in the ass for the bots. It basically lets me set a required alphanumeric input that potential members have to put in. Like so, "x xx xxxx." People who want to sign up have to enter any characters of the alphabet in place of x, have to put spaces where there are spaces, have to put the period at the end, and can't put any extra characters in or it'll refuse their registration. I also made sure the field would accept more characters than are actually in the "phrase" they have to type.
You can see what I mean by going to the ACU registration page and just looking right above the reCAPTCHA. The actual CAPTCHA and such are pretty trash at stopping bots.
Also, this method doesn't completely stop the bots forever. It seems like they eventually get a real person to fix their bot program (I think) so it types in the required phrase. About once every 3-4 months I get a bot that registers successfully which I delete right away and then I just go change the phrase real fast to something else. It's about three minutes of work, but it stops the bots dead in their tracks for a good long while each time.
You may want to consider doing something of the kind, as it works suprisingly well.
Anyway, what I did was I added a custom profile field that was mandatory to fill in upon registration. I also added in another feature, but that wasn't so important really. The field that was mandatory to fill in was the real kick in the ass for the bots. It basically lets me set a required alphanumeric input that potential members have to put in. Like so, "x xx xxxx." People who want to sign up have to enter any characters of the alphabet in place of x, have to put spaces where there are spaces, have to put the period at the end, and can't put any extra characters in or it'll refuse their registration. I also made sure the field would accept more characters than are actually in the "phrase" they have to type.
You can see what I mean by going to the ACU registration page and just looking right above the reCAPTCHA. The actual CAPTCHA and such are pretty trash at stopping bots.
Also, this method doesn't completely stop the bots forever. It seems like they eventually get a real person to fix their bot program (I think) so it types in the required phrase. About once every 3-4 months I get a bot that registers successfully which I delete right away and then I just go change the phrase real fast to something else. It's about three minutes of work, but it stops the bots dead in their tracks for a good long while each time.
You may want to consider doing something of the kind, as it works suprisingly well.
Let's see how Grim can implement something similar.
![[Image: Untitled-1-3.jpg]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v395/avianexus/Untitled-1-3.jpg)
