forums.marpirc.net

I remember a while ago, we discussed stopping the spam that is posted to this board, but I have been unable to find the relevant topic thread for more details.

I thought one of the suggestions was that users must upload a recording before being able to post a message. This was probably rejected as newbies may need help before submitting anything!

But, how about not allowing new users to post until 2 days after registering an account, would that help stop the spam? Was that discussed?

Basically, is anything being done, and can anything be done to stop the spam on the 'General' board?

Kranser.

i'm assuming seymore has tried but hasn't come up with anything. gameboy has achieved a spam free phpbb board by enforcing only anyone who uploads a confirmed harp recording can register to the harp board, but i'm not sure if you can do the same with marp, though that appears to be a possible solution.

Evil proposition for new name:
home action replay page online - HARPO

Can't one of those 'fill in the deformed letters/#'s' boxes be put into the registration process...There's a special name for them, but I'm drawing a blank. It seems to work for some sites.

yep those #letter things would be perfectly awesome! but i think if that was easily possible, seymore would have added it by now as we've been asking that for a while. maybe it's time for a board change...

I admit i thought this post was a spam when i first saw it :)

Are you tired of spam? Didn't we have a poll about membership & stopping spam? Do you want to stomp out all the spam on this site? Buy this product!

The TJT wrote:Evil proposition for new name:
home action replay page online - HARPO

Evil proposition for new name:
Mame Action Replay eXplosion - MARX

There are loads of different patches that give you a visual text confirmation to type in when posting. Here's an example of a good one - http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=495004
It's just getting someone to sit down and spend the time doing it that seems to be the main problem. Does Seymour actually frequent here these days? Haven't heard from him for ages.

I think maybe Chad is right though, time for a change. I think this forum is looking tired / neglected and needs updating imo. Seems to be much more a haven for spam bots than actual MARP members these days. VBulletin is an excellent board but isn't free unfortunately, but there are many more to choose from.

Also, on the subject, it think it needs to be in keeping with the rest of the site, colour scheme etc. And the title, marpirc?! What's all that about? Once upon a time I guess it was relevant with posting messages from the IRC channel. Six years ago maybe, not anymore surely?

Chad, here may be the problem with implementing the confirmation rule here:

HARP's main site and forums are virtually using the same user, using the same host, Dreamhost in this case, hence why I can implement the forum rule quite easily. It's not too aesthetically pleasing, but it does the trick.

MARP was programmed in Python. It's also uses a different host... MARPirc uses DreamHost, and MARP uses ZTNet. So I don't know if Zwaxy can program it so it can add users on a Dreamhost MySQL database.

I can betcha that VBulliten has the same problems as phpBB though as far as spam is concerned...

yep, i figured the harp like intergration would have some issues. but wait there's the mod that we all want, thanks to DRN, easy to install, will get rid of at least 90% of spam, To someone in control of the board: do it!
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=495004

Chad wrote:yep, i figured the harp like intergration would have some issues. but wait there's the mod that we all want, thanks to DRN, easy to install, will get rid of at least 90% of spam, To someone in control of the board: do it!
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=495004

Good.. good. Let's hope it gets implemented.

By the way, are you sure that the spam is created by automatic hackering programs registering accounts, rather than users manually creating accounts and posting?

Kranser.

It seems like all the spambots do is post on the first forum (at the moment) so simply making the first forum a 'spamtrap' forum would solve part of the issue for now.

Other than that if you customize the forum registration step with a few extra essential parts it would stop most of the bots (even something as simple as 'which famous arcade game character is this, a picture of pacman / other random well known character, and a select box which must be answered), however, there was something said about people actally being paid to create forum accounts for spamming, so it wouldn't stop those..

Hello,

I'm usually more of a lurker than a poster on MARP (although I managed a massive 3/4 on T10 ). I work as a senior project manager for a major UK digital coms agency and we have recently had 100's of clients reporting the same sort of forum spambot issxues as MARP and TG have been getting.

Is there no reason why you cannot impliment a captcha (dynamic image generation) system at the point of posting?

There seems to be established methods (http://www.matthewleverton.com/howto/ph ... ptcha.html / http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=382890) - apologies if link posting isn't permitted.

Google "PHPBB captcha" for more.

Again, apologies if I'm teaching you to suck eggs, but if any of he forum mods / devs want to PM me I'm more than happy to discuss options.


RichyS

Hi all,

Yes, I haven't been around here much these days. I just don't have the free time for it

Those captcha systems just don't work to stop spambots. They can get around them easily enough. All they do is annoy the normal users. The idea about having to answer a simple question that a bot couldn't do would make sense though, and might work to some extent.

The problem in keeping this board updated is with the addons that are around here. They require varying amounts of file editing, which would need to be done with each upgrade, assuming the addon itself has been updated. The same would go for any different theme, actually.

Sadly, I don't know for sure when I'll have time to work on any of that. Barry, I know it would be annoying, but do you think admin approval of new users would help any? Probably less time consuming than deleting spam posts and users, at least.

Better than nothing, I guess. At least, it should work better than Visual Confirmation, which basically did nothing, anyway.

The TJT wrote:Evil proposition for new name:
home action replay page online - HARPO

I would forget about HARPO.

Oprah's production company is her name backwards... HARPO.

...not worth the risk of any of her people coming after MARP over using their name.

MARX....interesting...but Karl come sto mind very quickly....don't want to be associated with marxism.