Bots

I was looking today at the amount of users online, and saw most of them are bots.
Same with birthdays, almost all bots.

We have been taken over :frowning:

We are being assimilated into skynet !

Skynet? Damn… I knew this day would come.

Seriously though, did you ban them? Any specifics you an give me so I can keep a look out too while we maybe get our security question changed or something?

EDIT: I see what you mean… :frowning:

http://tech-artists.org/forum/memberlist.php

You might look into IP Blocking Lists and/or something like this addon: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=176481

The forum I run I have the luxury of blocking Russia and China and a few other notorious countries. I end up with about 100 users spamming my registration page at any given time, but they don’t get to make accounts, so there is that.

delete the bots! all of them must go. rm -rf *

p.s. i hope i just didn’t wipe out the site

We have 31,271 members. I would say at least 70% are bots?

As the spam protection prevents quite a lot of the bots from posting a BIG cleanup would be deleting users with 0 posts i guess.

How often do bots log in? Is there a way to delete based on 0 posts + 1 login or similar?

I do not know how much control we have about accessing the database and running a script for removing those bots.

Rob?

resistance is futile

vBulletin does allow pruning of inactive users rather conveniently.

Yep I’m on it. Pruning of inactive users is one thing… I’ve done that but it’s harder to kill bots that have signed up in the last year and not kill valid users. I might have an idea, If I setup a user field that everyone must populate with a keyword and I send out a mass email to everyone to update this field or loose their account, I could then select everyone that doesn’t have that keyword and delete them. Also I will be installing some more anti bot signup software. YAY!!

Fingers crossed.

Thats what it was haha. Was confused when it said I didnt have a profile.

Haha, I had to think twice at the question. OATS?!

Thanks Rob. awesomesauce!

Nice work, Butters. Thanks for keeping us safe from the machine overlords.

Thanks Rob!

Thanks guys! keep an aye out if you see anything out of the ordinary and shoot me a line.

~B)

Those introductions that are popping up with a dot in their signature. Anything normal? :stuck_out_tongue:
Or are the bots getting good …

Is Ellerbesmith a real person or just a smart bot? :stuck_out_tongue: