[alt146]

You wonderful admin people have probably noticed already, but there's what looks a lot like a troll post in the SE Q&A section, entitled 'my new video blog'. Would you mind hitting it with a big stick?

[Grief]

Already pointed it out in the mod area, so it should be getting dealt with.

And its not a big stick anymore, as far as I know, its a hammer now

Edit: Ive deleted the thread, just now, didnt do it earlier because I wasnt aware my power stretched to that area.

[alt146]

Cool. I hope we wont see much more of stuff like that..

[Osric]

Another spammer. Pissing me off now, Im at work and a load of porn pics and videos just loaded, if my boss saw that I'd be out of a job.

[Aptorian]

Well, besides a single one who was political in nature, the spamthreads have been fairly obvious today in my opinion.

Rule of thumb, if the tittle of the thread or the OPs name seems dubious. Don't click. Same if the topic seems completely wrong for that particular forum.

[Osric]

Aptorian, on Nov 11 2008, 02:07 PM, said:

Well, besides a single one who was political in nature, the spamthreads have been fairly obvious today in my opinion.

Rule of thumb, if the tittle of the thread or the OPs name seems dubious. Don't click. Same if the topic seems completely wrong for that particular forum.

Thats the one I meant.
But yeah Ill just avoid them new topics in q&a at work. Any idea how this is happening? Is there some kind of bot that does this or actually a person. They get deleted fairly fast so what's the point in registering a new account every time? You need a new email and everything.

[Aptorian]

Silencer is working on a theory about the spambot using multiple ips, there are programs out there that are able to create random ips. I know that 4chan has lots of problems with those kinds.

[Osric]

Yeah but, it's a new registered user each time. So what happens, a bot managed to register to the forums? Isn't that what the little picture that you gotta type over is for? Anyway I'll do some research, just wondering because I create web applications myself and I've not seen a bot that managed to do that.

[Lisheo]

The CAPTCHA things... Interestingly, I brought this up with Hetan yesterday. Somehow these fellows are able to get passed that security measure, although I thought we didnt have one on this site. But if you go through their profiles, they're not people. They are just too single-minded and non-sensical.
It might be worth looking into this, though. I considered looking into it myself, but I'm not especially handy with the auld programming. There seems to be more and more of them lately, though.

[Grief]

Might just be we're noticing them more though, now that they're out job, and get pointed out to us specifically.

Or maybe its like we were told.

They come in waves

[Lisheo]

Seems like it. There were a good few today, though. Four, which is ridiculous.

[Aptorian]

5 actually

[Lisheo]

Just after looking it up on wiki(the be all and end all for knowledge lmao), and it seems spambots use Optical Character Recognition technology to bypass CAPTCHAS.

wiki said:

Recently, a very destructive forum spam attack has been propagated by inserting into comments redirect domains with an automated posting script like Xrumer. These domains redirect a user to pornographic Websites. If a user clicks on the image or attempts to close the Website an ActiveX codec will be downloaded as a Zlob Trojan[1].

Sounds rather unpleasant.

[Osric]

Yeah that sucks, means it'll only be more and more, the bots search google and find forums, they've seem to have found the q&a and another one (forgot which), they'll find the rest soon and spam more and more, maybe there's an update on the inivisionboard website that fixes this?

[Lisheo]

It allows you to ask questions in the registration page, but that's eventually going to become invalid too, I suspect. Seems this OCR business might be able to bypass it, also.
They have found the Q&A, the TtH forum, and RG forum, currently.

[caladanbrood]

What sort of questions are you allowed to ask on the registration? If you can put in something factual and Malazan-related, the bots aren't going to have a clue, but would be easy for any fan of the series...

[Lisheo]

I've no idea, actually. That's not a bad plan.

[Aptorian]

Not so brilliant plan. Unless it's something obvious related to the first book, ala who is the author of Gardens of the Moon.

Not all visitors are that into the series first time they arrive.

[caladanbrood]

I was thinking something along the lines of... What is Ganoes' surname? Or, if it's too hard, what is Ganoes Paran's surname, assuming the optical recognition cannot recognise that level of complexity...

[Grief]

Possibly, or what house does anomander rake, knight of high house dark, belong to, if they cant recognize stuff like that.

Other suggestions:

What is the name of the god of death.
Fill in the blank: Gardens of the ___
How many mules does it take to change a lightbulb.

We could perhaps open a thread, asking suggestions for suitable questions.