Help please! My Simple Machine is malfunctioning.

[Placid Dingo]

If you want technical details I'm really pretty lImited in what I know other than it's a simple machines forum.

In terms of purpose it's part of a project called Social NetROAR (www.socialnetroar.com) where I encourage a community to step out of a social networking site (or whatever they find themselves simply occupied by) and put that time towards a creative project.

I made it in December, went to Vietnam and forgot about it, planning to promote it in Feb for March. Then yesterday I was like ofuk, it's February. And then I saw I had 1600 pages of bots spagging things up.

I don't want to press the help me! thing too much because I know it's a pain for technical minds to be harassed by the non-technical but if anyone is willing to help me navigate smf and/or the hostgator systems please pm me.

[Placid Dingo]

Capcha does nothing. I've set it up so members need approval but I'm getting seriously 10 new members for approval a minute.

[Faust]

Capcha does nothing. I've set it up so members need approval but I'm getting seriously 10 new members for approval a minute.

Add one of those questions that force the user to add words or whatever. Make it hard for a machine to process (ie not a mathematical equation). What I put up here is a link to the first page of the principia which has the word Introduction on the top.
The question is "what is the word located on the top of this page:" followed by a link.

[Placid Dingo]

Awesome. I'll have a hunt for that. Is it a SMF mod or just an available option?

[Faust]

Awesome. I'll have a hunt for that. Is it a SMF mod or just an available option?

For SMF 1.x it is a mod, for 2.0 it's built in as default.

[El Sjaako]

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but doesn't pretty much any custom security work? Everyone is using ReCapcha, so the bots are programmed to handle that, but if you invent anything yourself (answer a custom question; detect if javascript is running and they scrolled to the bottom of the registration page; forcing them to submit, press back, and submit again; anything that's original and not just downloaded from the top 10 SMF plugins) they probably won't be bothered to adjust their bots to your anti-spam measure.

Then again, this advise is probably completely impractical for someone who is not technical.

[Faust]

Then again, this advise is probably completely impractical for someone who is not technical.

It doesn't really have to be anything to complex, like the question method I used that forces the user to check another page for the obvious keyword, that didn't really require any code at all.

[Placid Dingo]

Then again, this advise is probably completely impractical for someone who is not technical.

It doesn't really have to be anything to complex, like the question method I used that forces the user to check another page for the obvious keyword, that didn't really require any code at all.

Updating/adding mods to smf (or doing anything to it at all at this point from outside the forum itself) is currently beyond me, but I'm trying to teach myself and not doing too badly.

I have managed to prevent spammers spamming, begun banning and deleting bots, and prevented new bots successfully registering.

So the mod will happen. Just maybe not fast. I'm going to put back the intended start date to April and do it from March next year.

[Triple Zero]

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but doesn't pretty much any custom security work? Everyone is using ReCapcha, so the bots are programmed to handle that, but if you invent anything yourself (answer a custom question; detect if javascript is running and they scrolled to the bottom of the registration page; forcing them to submit, press back, and submit again; anything that's original and not just downloaded from the top 10 SMF plugins) they probably won't be bothered to adjust their bots to your anti-spam measure.

Then again, this advise is probably completely impractical for someone who is not technical.

There's actually also human spammers these days.

Some are just Blackhat SEO spammers with a "DIY" persuasion, and then there's the outsourced grunts hired via underground variants of Amazon's Mechanical Turk and such. Probably the same types from which you can buy credit to solve a 1000 CAPTCHAs for $1 (also done by humans in 3rd world countries).

[Placid Dingo]

That mod is in! Thank you

The whole project is going to be shift to May so I can try to flog it across March and April and still ignore it a little on school holidays.

Wanting a mod that will kill off my several thousand spammers. Cant find one so trying to work out how to upgrade to 2.0.