Spam bot infiltration - apologies & please be careful

[Doreen Peri]

Lately we've had an influx of spam bots registering and posting various paragraphs with links inserted in them in order to sell merchandise, or whatever.

I need to get a better spam bot stopper set up in the registration process and get someone to help me carry it through as I'm a techie dummy.

Until then, if you see any odd posts that are clearly off topic and have links in them, please don't click the links in the posts or on their profile website link! I am deleting the spam bot memberships and posts as I see them until I can get this situation resolved.

Apologies. Sorry this has been happening.

We used to have a math problem in the registration process which was installed by eyelidlessness and I hope to get something similar installed soon!

Thank you!

[Steve Plonk]

Neologistic, Something happened on S8 and I didn't realize what it was. Am I dense? Anyhow, my first inkling was when posts were removed from my anti-Tea Party thread in my "Life in the Horse Lane" column. Still truckin' gave me
a heads up but I still didn't see what was up. I also noticed that someone's intro post was removed today. People were referring to "bots"...What is a bot? ...An automatic spam post? I don't know for sure.

[Doreen Peri]

Steve,

I know you asked James, and maybe when he gets here he can explain it better than I can, but I'll give it a go first.

Spam bots are programs/scripts written by devious persons who are usually trying to sell something or link to various sites that sell something (thus "spam" for selling something and "bots" for not human). These bots are programmed to search the internet in a spider-like fashion to find discussion boards like this one and register as members/users of the site. They have become so sophisticated, that they not only have the links in their profile but also in their signatures and can also post but they are not people. When the administrators here (me, judih & neo) notice a post which appears to be a spam bot, not a real person, we research the user name, IP#, etc., to determine (our best guess) that this is not a person, but a computer program and we delete the membership and the posts made by that screen name. That's what happened in your column... a spam bot posted there... so the membership was deleted as well as the posts because the posts were for the sole purpose of a computer bot selling something. This morning, a new "member" registered and posted in the Introductions forum and Neo researched and discovered it was a spam bot so he removed it. I removed the introduction thread. Lately, we've had a problem with bots registering and we're working on a solution to stop them in the registration process. Currently we have the strange shaped letters which have to be read and typed in (which you see all over the net) which is called CAPTCHA, because bots can't read. But it's not working... some are still getting in.

For now, until we have a fix in place, if you see a new member and you are suspicious that the sole purpose is to sell something, don't click on the links they post because you don't know where the links will lead. We delete them as we see them so if you see something like that which has not been deleted, please send one of us a message with a link to the post so we can delete it.

-Doreen

PS - Please note that spambots are all over the net, not just studio8. It's a problem EVERY site on the net deals with.

PPS to James - Sorry ...didn't mean to hijack your introduction thread. Again, welcome back! It's wonderful to have you back on the site sharing your creativity as well as helping with Tech Support. We appreciate you!

Also, please see this announcement:
http://studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=19959

[Steve Plonk]

Doreen, et al., Thanks for explaining the Spambot problem to me, in Neologistic's thread, and I'm glad you are trying to do something about it. Litkicks and Lean Left also have had problems with spambots as I realized. I guess it is a problem all over the internet. I thought maybe I'd "stuck my foot
in my mouth" and offended someone. Nice to know it was a security breach.
If I see any strange posts, I will report them, as you indicated, and I will not click on them.

[Steve Plonk]

Thanks, Doreen, see my answer on your link.

[Doreen Peri]

You're welcome, Steve, and thanks!.... I should try to move that explanation post over here instead of on James' intro thread. Going to try to figure out how. Hah!... (this is why I need tech help. Neo helps me with stuff like this.... still going to try to move your question and my reply to this thread all by myself! wheeeee! lol)

PS - we should have it worked out soon so we get less of them. There was a while in the old software where we were getting like 50 a day! It was a nightmare! We got that fixed but this is new software... still, only a few a week are sneaking in so it's not that bad. Thanks for your patience!

[Doreen Peri]

Oh crap, I can't figure it out. Hopefully when James comes back, he can merge your question & my answer into this thread. I tried. sighhh.... (I can be an incompetent administrator sometimes)

Would be better to have those posts here on this thread so everyone who reads the threads about the bots will have the explanation, etc.

James, when you come back, can you look on your introduction thread and help merge the posts to this thread for us? Thank you!

[neologistic]

Merged