Dealing with Bots

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Posted by BGF
9/05/2019 5:51 pm
#1

Received a report of a bot on the site.  Found it was based in Portugal.  User has been banned.   

Thanks to BC for letting me know.   Let’s keep the site clear of the things that made the other site go downhill. 

Barry

 
Posted by BGF
10/03/2019 11:11 am
#2

Quick update on bots and spam for those who are interested about how the old site got inundated with spam (in addition to the other reasons for leaving that site).  In the past 40 days, we have had about 35 new registrants; of that amount, about 80% have been removed by me due to the likelihood that they are spam.  I have been using a webservice that allows me to check any email address as being likely to be a spam/bot, in which case this site has them blacklisted.  To test it out, I also checked many of our regular users (you'll be happy to know that you are all whitelisted).

My goal is to prevent such registrants from being permitted to sign on in the first place.  There are a few domains that I have seen that are clearly spammy (i.e.: Yandex.com), which have been banned completely.  I have also removed users with gmail addresses only if they were blacklisted.  

So that you know this is not random, the site I use to verify includes all of the websites in which the blacklisted entity has been reported as being blocked.  In every case, the email address has been blocked by at least 20 sites within a short time period (as little as a day).

In any case, I'm sharing this with you so that you know this is a thing.  I can't say if any of these blocked registrants would be dangerous (i.e.: including links that look real but could be a virus) or if they're just spammy.  Doesn't matter to me; as soon as I have verification that they are either fake (bots) or blacklisted, they get blocked.
 

 
Posted by PKGW
10/03/2019 4:07 pm
#3

Thanks for all of your hard work

 


 
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