[Suggestion] CAPTCHA?

I usually hate these damned things, but there's been a serious influx of bot accounts lately. While I do like the idea of a site where anyone can come in as a guest and post their opinion easily, a simple bot prevention method could probably go a long way.

What do you guys think, time to change our philosophy or no?

quote VeGiTAX2

Unfortunately captcha is annoying to regular users and provides no defense, it takes a bot 1-2 extra seconds to bypass it as entire programs are out there to use OCR to defeat it. As a result it's a pointless extra step that regular people get sacked with. :/ We opted for other routines that I cannot discuss at this point to stop most bots although we do get rabid spammers from time to time doing it by hand still.

quote Redemption

We did used to use CAPTCHA, but came up with a good alternative that is nearly as powerful at stopping bots, but without inconveniencing humans with a CAPTCHA test.

The second quote was said in reference to the news comments system, but it sounds like they use a similar system for posts. I assume you're referring to forum posts btw, you weren't entirely clear in your first post.

Neoseeker does not disclose the methods it uses in spam prevention in order for them not to be easily bypassed by spammers. They do have spam prevention methods in place that can't be seen.

CAPTCHA systems are very inconvenient to actual users and aren't necessary with the prevention techniques and moderator team we have on Neo.

quote hiigaran

ive noticed this influx as well, with particular emphasis on the computer hardware forums. what the bots seem to do there is to just copy and paste a sentence or two from another persons post. surely theres a way to perform some kind of filter on them if their post counts are below a set threshold and contain duplicate text?

Yes, I've seen that as well, in several forums. I'm still trying to figure out the purpose of them doing that. The only thing I can think of is because on some other sites you have to hit a certain post count to post everywhere, but I don't think we have anything like that in place here. They may do it regardless though.

Other than those, there's been a lot of advertisers as well lately. If we use some sort of heuristics, then perhaps it just needs to be updated. All of these seem to use similar formatting.

quote Redemption

Are you seeing this from guest accounts or registered accounts?

all registered. i cant recall a single guest that has cone this post copying thing

That looks pretty much like human created spam seeded from legit content. Very difficult to fight because it looks like real text and automated filters cannot detect it. Difficult even to detect by a non-human, let alone any automated system, since casual reading won't throw up any red flags. CAPTCHA won't do anything if a human is being paid to sit there and spam.

I suspect it is human because punctuation and context of the seeded strings is very natural, even when the original posts being seeded from have punctuation irregularities.

I did enable something to see if it might slow down any bot versions of this type of spam.