InsectNet forum

Well, I see that the new forum is already being aggressively targeted by spambots. Hopefully, the administrators have some settings available in the forum's software to help alleviate this issue.

Manual membership approval. Or at least prove you’re human

They seem to be everywhere on here.

Until the bots are blocked, they'll likely spam every thread, anytime a new (genuine) post is made to it.

Ok,
now I see the spam bots, and that's all I see, I see no intelligence or purpose, other than to insult our collective IQ. Am I supposed to click
on these "links"?, I'm not seeing that happen anytime soon.

Hello all

Hundreds of spambots have invaded and polluted the forum during the night...
Here are the current steps :
- I have added a "Registering question" to avoid these bots to register. If not enough, I will add other registering steps
- we are banning all the bots
- we are cleaning all their posts.

It will take few hours, sorry for this.
Olivier

OK I have found a way to kill all these spambots and their posts.

But I had to block registration to prevent them registering. It seems they have "broken" the CAPTCHA and registering question.
I will work now on reinforcing the human verification.

Sorry for all that.
And a huge thank you to the moderation team who tried to delete their accounts and posts one by one. It is impossible to do when it is a huge attack like this one.

I keep you all posted.

I have banned and deleted loads of them. Good to hear that you are putting steps in place to stop the bots from registering new users.

Adam.

kevinkk wrote: ↑Sat May 28, 2022 2:53 am Ok,
now I see the spam bots, and that's all I see, I see no intelligence or purpose, other than to insult our collective IQ. Am I supposed to click
on these "links"?, I'm not seeing that happen anytime soon.

These bots don't do that for human to click (nobody would do that). They do that for search engine crawlers.
Read this to better understand : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_building

I'll just take your explanation at face value, I don't use wikipedia because of their relentless requests for donations every time I would use
the site. Donate one or two times and you're marked for life.