So it doesn't get spammed. Plz.

:)

That was crazy, wasn't it? We've never had anyone so determined before.

It looked just like a bot. Usually when your forum gets cracked by a bot spam technique it means you need to change your security features or it will just happen again. Unless of course it was just a cheap labourer paid to spam. Which is sometimes the case but usually not when the text is all jibberishy like it was.

Generally a bot making it through is the result of someone manually validating before turning it back over to bot activities. Not much you can do about that.

I didn't even notice. Maybe I was too busy actually playing the game instead of haunting the forums? ;)

Unless you want the devs to add a captcha to every single stinking post, you're going to end up with a situation like Savet described, where a human sets up the accounts and turns the bot loose to post.

lets not waste dev time on something thats not really important. whens the Forum seriously spammed? every 1 or two years? and even then, Whistler had fixed it in the blink of an eye. much like arf i did not even see any spam... rzzzrt...

It's still going...

Haha holy crap it is too. Looks like a bot to me. Why not just limit thread making to 2 per day, and post limiting to 20 or so?

because the bots create new accounts too, you gotta change the whole account making system so it's bot proof.

Electricity you are the Jon Snow of forums. Once the bots start being able to spam the forum, they don't stop. It will bring the entire thing to a halt if not dealt with.

Guys, we've required a CAPTCHA solution and email-confirmation for years.

There's no workaround for this, other than administrative oversight. There is no "start being able to" spam forums.. they can always spam forums, all the time, as long as the accounts are created by humans.

We can probably add another CAPTCHA to thread creation or something, but it starts to get irritating for everyone else at some point.

You could do something like limit thread creation to 3 threads per hour for unpaid accounts, but then the bots would probably change to just spamming existing threads instead.

It seems that the best solution is to require a captcha for every post. It's a minor annoyance, I know, but it might be better and easier in the long run than having a spam bot problem.

This isn't the first instance of spam bots, it's just the first one you guys noticed. They've always been around. This is not a world-ending occurrence.

We perma-mute the specific accounts, email the abuse contact for the ISP, temporarily IP-ban the likely netblocks as needed, and move on.

thanks incarnate. i personally vote against more captchas. the VO Forums are not the biggest Forums out there, its much more lucrative to spam elsewhere and you guys have obviously been dealing greatly with the few spammers we had in the past as i've never seen any of it. thanks for that.

Once the bots start being able to spam the forum, they don't stop. It will bring the entire thing to a halt if not dealt with.

ahhhh help the bots... they are coooming!!! rozhozhoz. you're a great comedian TRS. the Forums is truly what you live for, huh??

It would be interesting to enable post-time CAPTCHAs only for accounts that have no characters over combat level 1 or something. That would require some data-finagling in the database, but would probably be a minimally-annoying solution for most people (and another reason for custom forums, heh).

Require a captcha on any post where the user has a post count less than 10

A new day, a new line of spam posts.

<shrug>. So they had another netblock. Filtered now. I could do this all day and it would still be a lot less impact on dev-time than Ray implementing a fundamental change in how posts are made.

We'll add that at some point.

I suppose you could conscript some moderators to help if it becomes more trouble.

+1 to devs spending minimal time on an out-of-game accessory, and more time on things that affect the actual game we pay for & play (well, most of us at any rate)

Perhaps if TRS is so bothered by the spam that the rest of us barely even see before the swift & inevitable cleanup, he should apply to be a mod :)