when I seen the topic title I knew what this was going to be about.Current: 3.3.9
Planned 3.3.11
My query is a follow-up on viewtopic.php?t=2167909 from many years ago.
I have a Q&A spambot question in place, but this isn't stopping real (shady) people signing up with
sh.k.ut.ko.v.i.g.orecze.k.best@gmail.com
sh.kutkov.igo.r.e.cz.ek.be.st@gmail.com
etc etc
Banning by IP, email and even country (I have Filter by country extension) isn't working as they are obviously using VPNs to keep popping up all over.
I don't want to make the Q&A question so difficult as to be ungoogleable, so I'm wondering if the idea to ban
*.*.*.*@gmail.com
or even
*.*.*@gmail.com
still works, as I don't know any genuine gmail users who have more than one dot, so happy to rule out any gmail address with 2 dots or more.
imo this isn't the correct approach. you may not know anybody but my forum has many genuine users with multiple dots, we have 30,000+ plus members.
despite our Q&A working great for years without issue only recently we have had a deluge of spambots using AI I believe to get around it and past few topics ive seen on here the devs/mods seem to be dismissing it as your Q&A sucks when imo it doesn't, we just need to keep ahead of their tactics.
What I had to do recently was install the stop forum spam plugin
https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/exte ... orum_spam/
I have went from 20-40 bots per day sitting in the moderation queue over the past week to 0 new registrations.
I still have a few stragglers that managed to register an account before the plugin was installed but that's stopped now too.
with all due respect, this is unhelpful. I don't think your team are taking onboard the severity of this recent wave of bots ability to crack even the hardest of Q&A.It is on topic. It's far easier to stop them from registering in the first place with good Q&A.
Statistics: Posted by projectpulse — Fri Apr 05, 2024 4:14 pm