Has anyone tracked down Bekkeypelet?

jingo811 · Post by **jingo811** » Sat Feb 23, 2008 4:39 pm

Has anyone tracked down Bekkeypelet? Or where the robot originates?
Bekkeypelet is starting to annoy me.

Post by **jnewman** » Sat Feb 23, 2008 4:46 pm

I've been deleting his posts and banning his accounts and emails. You'd think they guy would give up. These spammers are a waste of flesh.

austin987 · Post by **austin987** » Sat Feb 23, 2008 5:32 pm

On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 3:46 PM, jnewman <[email protected]> wrote:

I've been deleting his posts and banning his accounts and emails. You'd think they guy would give up. These spammers are a waste of flesh.

Have you tried banning his ip(s)/range(s)?

-Austin

jingo811 · Post by **jingo811** » Sat Feb 23, 2008 6:29 pm

I think it might be robots judging by the frequency WineHQ is being hit by spammers. phpBB is the number 1 target of all forum motors.
I don't remember when registering but did you implement some sort of
CAPTCHA?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

This kind of things are new to me but I think this is the first measure you take against all the circulating robots on the net.
phpBB.com should have some CAPTCHA plugin for these occasions.

Zachary Goldberg · Post by **Zachary Goldberg** » Sat Feb 23, 2008 6:39 pm

On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 6:29 PM, jingo811 <[email protected]> wrote:

I think it might be robots judging by the frequency WineHQ is being hit by spammers. phpBB is the number 1 target of all forum motors.
I don't remember when registering but did you implement some sort of
CAPTCHA?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

This kind of things are new to me but I think this is the first measure you take against all the circulating robots on the net.
phpBB.com should have some CAPTCHA plugin for these occasions.

Captchas do not work in phpbb, every one of them has been broken.

What _does_ work (from personal experience) is requiring user
registration to post, and during registration requiring the answer to
a simple question. There is a mod called "Textual Confirmation" which
does this perfectly. Something like

What color does mixing red and blue make? (purple)

or something silly like that. Stopped all spam 100% on my phpBB forum.

http://bbantispam.com/tc/

--
Zachary Goldberg
Computer Science & Engineering
Electrical Captain of Penn Electric Race Team
School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania

jingo811 · Post by **jingo811** » Sat Feb 23, 2008 6:50 pm

nice work.

nicholas.g.lawrence · Post by **nicholas.g.lawrence** » Sun Feb 24, 2008 7:11 pm

Captchas do not work in phpbb, every one of them has been broken.

The basic problem with CAPTCHA, registration, etc, is that it
erects a barrier to access. Some users would give up at that
point and not contribute.

Ideally, there should be a method that determines if someone
is truly a person, and that determination should happen
once, but work work for all forums.

Is there potential for wine forums to co-operate with other
forums (eg linux, firefox, openoffice) so that passing one
CAPTCHA/registration grants access to a whole group of
forums at once?

This would increase the incentive for passing the CAPTCHA
or registration, and people would be more keen to go
to the extra effort.

Also, if one forum notices a robot posting, they can ban
it from all forums in one hit, allowing the effort of
moderation to be shared amongst forums.

nick

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David Gerard · Post by **David Gerard** » Sun Feb 24, 2008 7:17 pm

On 25/02/2008, [email protected]
<[email protected]> wrote:

The basic problem with CAPTCHA, registration, etc, is that it
erects a barrier to access. Some users would give up at that
point and not contribute.

Yeah. The problem is how to make something that isn't a barrier to
normal users. Moderating account registrations and moderating users'
first posts should catch a lot of it.

Is there potential for wine forums to co-operate with other
forums (eg linux, firefox, openoffice) so that passing one
CAPTCHA/registration grants access to a whole group of
forums at once?
This would increase the incentive for passing the CAPTCHA
or registration, and people would be more keen to go
to the extra effort.

This is where Akismet is useful - it uses both Bayesian filtering (for
spammy keywords) and a distributed trouble-source database across
thousands of WordPress installations. In my experience on my blog it
gets a few false negatives and almost no false positives. You'll need
to watch it, but it's worth a try!

- d.