canadian oddy wrote:
Yeah it's a never ending battle.
I just wish there was a way to send an electronic nuke right back to the computer that sent that junk and just melt the machine right in the goofs hands.
CO
Yeah tech is evolving they find new ways to circumvent and automate the create account process, years ago I could post their IP addresses and let users abuse (Nuke) the connections into oblivion, now days I am sure they are using fake IP addresses so you would just be Nuking some poor innocent victim. If I would spend a great amount of time researching and installing the latest amount of countermeasures design to detect bots I could block them all. The only problem is then innocent legit people can get caught up and would not be allowed to create an account and find help or contribute.
Imagine if this was your site, I stumbled onto it and wanted to share my knowledge but could not get past the create account process and out of frustration of not being able to create an account just moved on. My knowledge and experiences would never be shared.
I rather fight the bots and delete the spam accounts the manual way over losing a quality member. Spam bots come in waves, this is a low volume site so its not as big of a target like Twitter or Facebook, they could care less how many legit users they lose they have thousands of new accounts created daily. The bots will leave once they see the 20 accounts the created were deleted when they come back to flood the site a few days later. Its an election year so I figure as we get closer to the election another wave of bots will appear.
I am sure AI will evolve and to the point we will have AI bots sighing up, replying to post like humans then start sending private messages to users with witty messages to lure them to another site and sell products. When we reach that point I will be forced to tighten up the site to flush them out, this will frustrate the human members to no end. There has been a LOT of discussion of AI being most of the internet traffic in the future and the fear of online advertisers and sales taking a huge hit.