Forum Registration 'Disabled'

Duff

For the time being, forum registrations are disabled. Well, not exactly disabled, but if you register you won't be able to post.

This is necessary to keep the spambots at bay until we implement a better CAPTCHA solution.

Ka0s

how difficult would it be to make the register page ask you to copy/paste a URL into your address bar, THEN youre at the registration page...?

Rioter

Not too difficult. That's a bit cheating though.

Have something like what colour is a black car or 10 - 4 thing.

BlueSun

Ka0s wrote:

how difficult would it be to make the register page ask you to copy/paste a URL into your address bar, THEN youre at the registration page...?

I don't think that actually solves anything...

Ka0s

BlueSun wrote:

Ka0s wrote:

how difficult would it be to make the register page ask you to copy/paste a URL into your address bar, THEN youre at the registration page...?

I don't think that actually solves anything...

well if its really just a bot, how could it do that?

BlueSun

Well what exactly were you thinking? From the description, it sounded to me like you want the registration page to ask the user to copy and paste a URL. So if the URL is on the registration page, what stops the bot from following it?

Even still, what stops the bot from accessing the URL direct?

I don't know how sophisticated these bots are, but surely it's possible.

Ka0s

BlueSun wrote:

Well what exactly were you thinking? From the description, it sounded to me like you want the registration page to ask the user to copy and paste a URL. So if the URL is on the registration page, what stops the bot from following it?

Even still, what stops the bot from accessing the URL direct?

I don't know how sophisticated these bots are, but surely it's possible.

how would it follow a plaintext url?

BlueSun

Regexp... have it look for a pattern that matches a link, then go to the link it finds.

You might try a mod like this:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=472940

Rioter

That's the sort of thing that could work.

If no-one's going to do it tonight, then I may as well put it on.

Edit: Not happening. Stitch's overreacting tonight and has kicked me off the server, had a go at me for not knowing enough postgresql etc etc.

Edit2: Wa pointed this out on IRC, seems this may not be targeted, more like a recaptcha problem. http://groups.google.com/group/recaptch ... cda3dc7687 - may explain a lot of things

Duff

8)

Some updates:

I installed a user list admin mod and pruned all zero post users from the database.

I've also done some minor tweaks such as removing the "Moderators" line from the forum index and removing the tl;dr phpBB user agreement and replacing it with something more concise.

I have reenabled user registration since the user list mod makes it easy to prune out spam accounts until Google fixes ReCAPTCHA.

BlueSun

Something on that google groups page peaked my interest. One of the users mentioned checking against stopforumspam... perhaps you could implement that.

Rioter

I think that was mentioned by stitch in IRC yesterday. It's something being concidered.

Duff

Rioter wrote:

I think that was mentioned by stitch in IRC yesterday. It's something being concidered.

IIRC, he put in the proxy checker last night, not sure about the stopforumspam thing.

BlueSun

Hypnos has a proxy checker, I'm not sure how good it is, but it has one never the less.

BOD

akismet works pretty well for stopping spam for me, I'm pretty sure theres a phpbb mod for it.