Spam issues

Human de-captcha services. There's services where people just enter captchas all day, and they have APIs that spambots can hook into. The human never sees the website or anything, they just see the image and type the text, and the bot gets the right answer to the captcha. This allows banks of people to handle thousands upon thousands of captchas a day.

I've seen some really strange spambot behavior on the wiki before. Bots will post somewhat randomly generated paragraphs with key sentences/keywords, designed to avoid detection while at the same time specifically triggering things that google's search algorithms pick up on. On the wiki we have a spamblacklist that's powered from the blacklist used on Wikipedia (and some of our own manual entries), but sometimes the bot will try alternative forms of the url or go on this "keep posting as much as possible" run, and in the end they don't even include a link (either blocked or got lost in the bot's efforts to mix things up).

Some of the most advanced spam-blocking technology lately is behavior tracking. I've seen this for forum software and for wikis. Basically, there are "filters" of behavior, like "new user who posts at x rate of posts, during this time of day, with a link" etc. They can be more simple, or far more complex. I know the "AbuseFilter" on Wikipedia has some crazy high hit rate with their filters, with almost no false positives (something like 1%, IIRC). Something like that for MyBB exists, and might be just what we need.

we have a "bad behaviour" plugin in place Ned Scott.We also used Akismet for a while, but it was way to aggressive and had lot's of false positives.

(2012-07-27 10:18)da-anda Wrote:  we have a "bad behaviour" plugin in place Ned Scott.We also used Akismet for a while, but it was way to aggressive and had lot's of false positives.

Bad Behavior, that's the one I was thinking of! I heard good things about it, and I wonder if it's working well and we're just seeing a tiny percentage of spam that slips past.

Funny that you mention Aksimet being too aggressive, as the wiki had the same problem (well, it liked to block real users, but not spammers).

Same here with akismet