Phoenix Gold Phorum

so i still brows SB once in a while and i just noticed the newest registered user is "bfowler3.0"


and although there is the possibility i made the profile while asleep...walked over to my parents house from my little loft....went into my brothers room without waking him up, and created a new account. I'm leaning toward some buddy is about to try and fuck with me.


thoughts

looks like you need alot of revisions done becasue they skipped a few version in there.


just a thought

yeah, I saw the 3.0 thing and went WTF, but I figured you were just jiving your space over there
I would keep a watch on that person, just for S&G...

Sounds like Eerin to me. But either way, I hop this version of the Bfowler doesn't look like a computer shit him out.

Francious70 wrote:Sounds like Eerin to me. But either way, I hop this version of the Bfowler doesn't look like a computer shit him out.

maybe this version can pee in a butt of someone on this forum all the way from soundbuggy

I assumed you were trying to whore the 500th or 1000th user like you did 100 (or something?), but the number seemed to be insignificant.

Might just be a bot that checks the memberlist and steals other peoples names.

stipud wrote:Might just be a bot that checks the memberlist and steals other peoples names.

What's up with that? I seen the username "googlebot" on this forum but their is no registered user with that name?

Google and other search engines use "bots" to go through pages in order to index them. Once a page is fully indexed, it will be searchable. The reason you see Googlebot is because I have modifications installed to make it easier for me to control the bots, see what they index, and how "well" they index (better indexing = higher page rank in google = you show up earlier in the search results).

Now there is a different kind of bot that simply targets open forums in order to register new accounts which spam the hell out of the boards. This is happening a LOT on soundbuggy, because there is no protection from these malicious spammers. If you check out their memberlist, most new accounts end up having URL links in their profiles to transvestite, rape, incest, and free money scam sites. The only reason they aren't posting is that SoundBuggy requires you to activate your profile by following a link in an email which is sent out. Since they use false details when signing up, they never get the email, so they can never post. This still leaves a ton of annoying bots in your memberlist.

I have done everything in my power to stop malicious bots from hitting our server, but to aid search engine bots so that more people can find us. If you check out soundbuggy's google cache for instance, you will see very very few pages indexed from the forums. This is because the forums dynamic nature makes it difficult to index by a bot. We should not have this same problem, but we have yet to have been fully indexed by Google, so I'm not completely sure if it worked or not yet.

The Exile forum gets hit with the spam posts daily. Sometimes several will appear a day.

Proper administration can solve that in a matter of minutes.

Tell them to go to the administration panel
General Admin
Configuration
Enable account activation -> User
Enable Visual Confirmation -> Yes

This will take care of 95% of bots. After this you need only a few simple modifications in place to stop them completely.