Possibly solution to avoid spambots

[BloodySword]

Hi,

I have an idea to stop the spambots here:

1. Change the location from "forum" to "commuity"
2. Correct the link "Forum" to the new URL and rename the label "Forum" to "Community" also in the image alias, text and link description etc.

I think the bots won't find the forum again... Or I hope it. xD

[Darlis]

That could really work, for one or two days... 

[Kasuha]

I guess it would suffice to put any external links under supervision (i.e. any signature/post with external link requires moderator approval). There's not that much of these here so it would not mean any big problem for normal usage. But the question is whether the forum software supports that.

[Darlis]

IIRC there is no such functionality in this forum version. Jeroen could set the option to approve every new registered member, but that means he'll get a lot of mails to check.

The new version of this forum has the verification questions system build-in, the best anti-spam-bot measure you can get.

[BloodySword]

The links are not such a problem. The user can copy the post number und substitute it on the url bar.
I think the spamboty don't search for forums labeled "community".

[Darlis]

If that would be true, it would be a great anti-spam measure and everyone would talk about it. Of course, the spammers then would start to search for "community", too.

[BloodySword]

What do you think about "helpdesk"?

[Darlis]

I think spam-bots don't look for "forum" or similar in the url. I think that they analyse the forum files directly, in whatever subdirectory they might be.

[woodfold]

Maybe if this was hosted on software that had an antispam plugin, like wordpress, you might reduce it with manually reviewing all posts. I used one and had hundreds of spams blocked, with only 1-2 getting to "possible".

But, that's a big job converting all this site's content.

[BloodySword]

I think spam-bots don't look for "forum" or similar in the url. I think that they analyse the forum files directly, in whatever subdirectory they might be.

That's simply not possible by the HTTP protocol.

[Darlis]

From How do spambots work?:

Crawling and looking for signatures of known software. Usually this is a snippet of text like a copyright or a meta tag but it could be any consistent identifier. This usually applies to blog and forum software.

[BloodySword]

This can only be done be following links.
It is possible to obfuscate links by JavaScript.

[Darlis]

Well, then good luck obfuscating every link to the forum...

[BloodySword]

No it is enough to obfuscate the entry point link and tell google not to touch the forum while indexing.
And if all links should be obfuscated: PHP does it for you.

[thosthos]

These things are an absolute plague! Solutions tend to involve considerable time or restrictions on forum usage that, in the end, deter visitors. The problem is that easy solutions are easy to get round. Having said that, I see one fairly common and seemingly effective solution that is quite simple! This is the technique of asking a question of visitors that they have to answer before accessing the forum. The question can be anything you like, e.g. what is 9 divided by 3? or what colour do you get from mixing blue and yellow? The bots haven't a clue what to do unless they are programmed for your specific site. In which case, you just change the question! This works, whereas email verification and captcha methods are useless.

For an implementation (complete with buggy code!) for phpBB forums see http://www.thesamet.com/blog/2006/12/21/fighting-spam-on-phpbb-forums/

I hope this helps.