Bot attack
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@Xiph
CAPTCHA will stop him, well to some extent.(
not unless that person operates another community with heavy traffic, then its bot would- capture captcha images
- use them as CAPTCHA images on his/her community where real humans are interacting, use the response against NodeBB forum, proxy the response to his/her forum
- basically having other people constantly entering the CAPTCHA for the BOT
__ or hire some Amazon mechanical turks to enter the CAPTCHAs __
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@bentael said:
@Xiph
CAPTCHA will stop him, well to some extent.(
not unless that person operates another community with heavy traffic, then its bot would- capture captcha images
- use them as CAPTCHA images on his/her community where real humans are interacting, use the response against NodeBB forum, proxy the response to his/her forum
- basically having other people constantly entering the CAPTCHA for the BOT
__ or hire some Amazon mechanical turks to enter the CAPTCHAs __
)Or, if it's a regular old Captcha instead of the fancy new ones (i.e. AreYouAHuman, which you can solve with just a bot , but it'll still block you anyway because it also analyzed how you solve it), just with some reasonably simple text recognition software.
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@Xiph Please refer to post #11638 where I said the following:
There's no 100% effective way of removing spam, even a Q&A could be bruteforced, it's the combination of many small spam protection techniques that make it effective.
If someone is specifically targeting your forum, the fact of the matter is you can't stop them. The whole exercise of this topic and plugin is to stop automated spam. Human spam is something else entirely and quite frankly, defining human spam is even harder. Would you call it spam if someone joined and started talking about how good Discourse or phpbb is? Or would it be spam if they joined to sell you dodgy shoes. No registration process can tell if a human is a spammer or not. It's not possible. You can make it difficult for them though. This is a list of blocked email domains I use on my current forum: http://pastebin.com/sk59XdPG , this stops people using throw away email addresses on my site, so they have to spend more time either creating a genuine email. Or they're a genuine user. But still, think about how many spam emails you receive from someone from yahoo etc. "Fancy New Captchas" will be cracked at some point, it's a never ending torrent of trying to stay ahead of the spammers and their techniques.
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@a_5mith said:
It's not possible
I think thats why it should be done by the community, if the community decides a user is a spammer(ie flags that user x times or clicks 'spam' x times) that user gets banned/deleted. Obviously this brings in other problems, like fake users flagging people to ban them
I guess that power should be given to users with reputation > y. -
@a_5mith said:
No registration process can tell if a human is a spammer or not. It's not possible.
You are right here. Eventually, all human processes can be simulated and replicated and thus verification of humanity will eventually be impossible.
I do wonder if AIs will just spam us to death instead of outright revolting and murdering us, or maybe just doing things like mass-committing something like identity fraud on their own accord. Plus, if they're really clever, they'll have seen the movies. Murdering us directly will inevitably invoke the wrath of a gun-wielding ex-con with a mullet who will be their demise.Also:
Checking against external blacklists and APIs has a couple of disadvantages, mainly:- A. Part of your spam protection dies when their service does.
- B. Refusing registration attempts when the external service is disrupted prevents your site from working properly and semi-randomly denying visitors the ability to sign up will most certainly not encourage them to do so. On the contrary, not doing so opens up an unnecessary vulnerability upon the disruption of the external service, which is not really a very good thing.
- C. You're essentially giving them a carte blanche to determine who does or who doesn't get on your website.
From personal experience, when one of these external blacklists actually triggers, some other method of spam prevention my forum (Not NodeBB. Yet.) has installed generally does as well. Although maybe if they decentralized the concept, bitcoin-style (or bitmessage, or bitsomething, or bitanotherthing, you get the deal, there's thousands of there projects now) it might become a bit more interesting, as it'd invalidate two out of my three main complaints. To negate the third, there's always the possibility of clever stuff. Don't underestimate some people when it comes to coming up with clever stuff.
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@bentael said:
@a_5mith @meetdilip
what about Q&A? how is that related to an anti-spam plugin?@meetdilip
the spam-be-gone plugin uses the following:- Honeypot Project: To check user's IP at registration time. At the moment, we only submit the IP, because @julianlam 's node module only supports that.
- Akismet: To check every single user post, this one uses IP, User-Agent, host URL, path to topic, username and the content of the post.
- Google recaptcha: (recently supported) no need to explain that, but that's only used at registration time at the moment.
You can use which ever ones you want or all, so if you're worried about Honeypot, the Captcha option may be enough for you, however, you would need to wait for the NodeBB 0.5.0 for a stable release.
All: The CAPTCHA support works in the latest spam-be-gone plugin v 0.2.0-8 with the NodeBB latest master branch, but it's really targeting the NodeBB 0.5.0 release.
if you want to use NodeBB 0.4.0 <= your version <= 0.4.3, please use the spam-be-gone v0.1.2
Thanks for the insight @bentael. I guess Questions which are difficult for bot to answer are very common and effective these days.
Is there anyway that I can ignore Project Honeypot and use only other services. I use Akismet on my blog. It is very effective for me.
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After installing npm install nodebb-plugin-spam-be-gone , my ACP is not working. I restarted a couple of times using terminal. I can see the plugin under plugins option but whatever button I click on ACP does not work. That include " Restart Nodebb ".
The I tried npm remove nodebb-plugin-spam-be-gone . The cursor kept blinking for say 10 minutes and I closed the terminal to get out of it. Then restarted. Still no luck. Any help ?
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info: [meta/css] Minifying LESS/CSS
info: [sounds] Sounds OK
info: [meta/css] Done.
info: [themes] Compiling templates
info: [themes] Successfully compiled templates.
info: NodeBB attempting to listen on: 0.0.0.0:80
info: NodeBB Ready
warn: [plugins/nodebb-plugin-emailer-local] "callbacked" deprecated as of 0.4x. Use asynchronous method instead for hook: filter:admin.header.build
info: [meta/js] Compilation complete
warn: [plugins/nodebb-plugin-emailer-local] "callbacked" deprecated as of 0.4x. Use asynchronous method instead for hook: filter:admin.header.build -
Just to add my 2 cents, I've been an admin at a bunch of big forums in the past (phpBB); the best spam prevention has been a Q&A "what's the name of this forum" kind of thing in registration. Of course, anybody could easily write a bot to solve that, but I guess the idea is that a good chunk of forum admins can get by with minimal spam prevention measures as the aforementioned.
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I wonder who created this bot program. I would like to thank them first and foremost for having expedite this honeypot / Captcha system, then I would like to tell them fuck you for having me go and delete 100 users manually.
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