Save Empire Earth

The spam on the forum seems to have reached a new all-time high. The newest spammer has created over 1000 spam threads since tuesday (wtf). It's getting extremely tedious.

Is there something we could do about this? I'm not familiar with these topics, but there will be possibilites to put them more obstacles in the way or not? If necessary, maybe with a registration stop for new members.

It might also be good to give some willing active users rights in the forum to eliminate the spam on a regular basis.

What do you think about this?

push due spam

the only thing i can think of is some sort of detection that detects 2 or more posts to be the same, as it seems those accounts do pass the Captcha ( I am not a robot thingy).

But considering the forums are hosted on phpBB platform, I do not know if there are addons that can prevent those kind of stuff.

As for more staff, I asked Judocus/Artnzen if I could become some sort of low-power moderator, that can clean those kind of accounts.

Back to the old situation where accounts had to be verified will fix the whole problem. But as Arntzen once said it was more effort to manually verify new forum accounts than remove hundreds of spamusers and thousands of posts. (I doubt that this is true but it's just a quote.)

lightnessking. wrote:Back to the old situation where accounts had to be verified will fix the whole problem. But as Arntzen once said it was more effort to manually verify new forum accounts than remove hundreds of spamusers and thousands of posts. (I doubt that this is true but it's just a quote.)

it is true and also innefficient.

You can do a Manual Verification aka, when the user registers, it's no longer a email sent to verify, but the Admins themselfs have to approve of it.

Problem with this is simple tho, even if you approve them, you still have no idea if it's a bot or not.Check the current spam bots names, there's nothing unusual about them.

users with 10 posts or below should complete a captcha before posting

Bogdan_xD wrote:

lightnessking. wrote:Back to the old situation where accounts had to be verified will fix the whole problem. But as Arntzen once said it was more effort to manually verify new forum accounts than remove hundreds of spamusers and thousands of posts. (I doubt that this is true but it's just a quote.)

it is true and also innefficient.

You can do a Manual Verification aka, when the user registers, it's no longer a email sent to verify, but the Admins themselfs have to approve of it.

Problem with this is simple tho, even if you approve them, you still have no idea if it's a bot or not.Check the current spam bots names, there's nothing unusual about them.

I know, that's why they stopped doing it? I just said that.. You could ask ingame for an admin to verify their accounts but that leaves the problem of people not being able to get the game running and thus contacting the admins. (Since they wouldn't be able to use the forums for that.) I don't know if private messaging is an option for newly created users, but you could create a 'Read Me' post that tells the user to private message an admin to gain posting rights for the forum. That means it's back to manually verification again except this time you'll know wether it's a bot or a person.

Of course this leads to another problem, since humans aren't always capable of following detailed steps/tutorials. They tend to do trial and error methods which leaves them with questions. And in order to ask those questions, they would need to follow a detailed tutorial on how to gain access to the forums to post said questions. (The 'Read Me' post from previous section.)

This forum is powered by phpBB software (see link at bottom). Easiest way to prevent spam is installing an antispam plugin: https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/exte ... ti-spam-41
or better, use google reCAPTCHA: https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/old/docs/phpbb

drex / yukon

drex888 wrote:This forum is powered by phpBB software (see link at bottom). Easiest way to prevent spam is installing an antispam plugin: https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/exte ... ti-spam-41
or better, use google reCAPTCHA: https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/old/docs/phpbb

drex / yukon

nice, would be good someone could install this

Maybe I was too naive to think they already had installed that plugin and the bots found a workaround. But then again, a lot of websites never update at all.

problem is, if jucodus/zen even have the rights to the NeoEE domain to add the plugin, or is Ghost/Omega the only ones that have

Okey, so I've pm-ed Omega and Ghost now. Hopefully they know something that can fix this. I don't know much about what's going on under the hood at this forum so I don't want try something since I very well might break more than I fix.

We're currently using reCAPTCHA v2 on this forum, maybe it's so easy as to just add the reCAPTCHA v3 will solve everything.

The system we had for manually verifying accounts was too time consuming, and I don't think that is going to be a good solution. Basically I got 200 emails a day, and these bots would have automatic replies that were almost human-like so I actually had to open all 200 emails and read the "plead to get accepted" speech to see who were bots and who were real. This combined with the fact that a lot of the people trying to get an account here either didn't follow the instructions on how to get accepted or didn't understand them.
If there is a better system I'm all ears.

There probably isn't except for updating the captcha. Not sure if it's possible in the settings but allow users to post after 5 minutes of registration? Not sure how the bots are scripted though.