Forum over-run with advertising bots

[Jamiet99uk]

Isn't there a way to stop these advertising bot accounts from signing up?

[learnedSloth]

I wonder whether asking some site-specific questions would be better than a generic captcha? Then bots would have to target this site specifically.

[captainmeme]

Now my watch has ended o7

[captainmeme]

Sorry for the delay on sorting this, I've been pretty busy this week.

Honestly the best solution would probably just be not allowing users to post to the forum until several hours after they've signed up. These spammers only ever post directly after they sign up for the site, I imagine if they find they can't, they'll move on to somewhere else.

[captainmeme]

Also if I've missed any, please let me know!

[Jamiet99uk]

Sorry for the delay on sorting this, I've been pretty busy this week.

Honestly the best solution would probably just be not allowing users to post to the forum until several hours after they've signed up. These spammers only ever post directly after they sign up for the site, I imagine if they find they can't, they'll move on to somewhere else.

This is a good idea.

[Octavious]

I saw a documentary the other day about a care home in this Japanese town, where most of the younger population had moved away to the big cities, in which the bickering elderly residents were kept occupied by various robots...

... not sure what brought that to mind...

[captainmeme]

It's okay grandad, we've got some lovely oil paintings for you to inspect over here

[JECE]

It's okay grandad, we've got some lovely oil paintings for you to inspect over here

Genuine fake oil paintings, at that! Just like the genuine fake companionship of a robot!

[Jamiet99uk]

Bumping this as clearly this is still a serious problem.

[Jamiet99uk]

BUMPING THIS THREAD

@Kestas - what are you guys doing about this?

You need to change the sign-up process to block these accounts from ever reaching the site.

[jamesa7171]

Fully support ^. Between the blatant advertising bots and the "bumping old threads with chatGPT comments" bots, it seems like legitimate posts have become a minority on the forum? I'll repost something I already posted elsewhere:

As a relatively new user to the forum, it is depressing that on every single new post, I have to first check whether the poster is human or not (because half the time they're not). It makes me not even want to bother reading the new posts. Can something *please* be done about this problem?

[BrianBaru]

"Honestly the best solution would probably just be not allowing users to post to the forum until several hours after they've signed up."
Maybe after they signed up for a game

[Jamiet99uk]

"Honestly the best solution would probably just be not allowing users to post to the forum until several hours after they've signed up."
Maybe after they signed up for a game

Good idea!

[Bonatogether]

we should ban everything that's not a mafia thread

[Jamiet99uk]

we should ban everything that's not a mafia thread

Louie: Hey I thought you said Troy McClure was dead.

Fat Tony: No, what I said is that he sleeps with the fishes! You see...

Louie: Uh, Tony, please, no. I just ate a whole plate of dingamagoo.

[Chaqa]

we should ban everything that's not a mafia thread

Agreed. As all users and games are not mafia threads, the site is hereby closed!

[Bonatogether]

mafia kouncil coup when

[kestasjk]

Damn.. let's see.. looking at the list of banned users none of them joined games (except a couple non-bot bans which have joined loads of games), so I could make it so users can only post to the forum after they've joined a game.

This does add the risk that if they are humans or are targeting the site they'll start joining games, which is definitely not what we want, and it means people who want to post on the forum but don't want to join a game for some legit reason (though it's kind of hard to think of one) wouldn't be able to post.

Any thoughts on that?

I've always had in the back of my mind the Backstabbr approach which is to use a subreddit instead of a forum.. It'd be kind of neat to just go with CM's Discord and a subreddit, we could look at integrating it in to some extent, and I like the idea of tying user accounts here to reddit accounts for extra verification.

[BrianBaru]

"and it means people who want to post on the forum but don't want to join a game for some legit reason"
The only legitimate reason for someone wanting to post without joining a game is to ask a question of the mechanics of the game or the mechanics of the site. You could have a "Ask a Question" forum site where new users could ask questions