NationStates

Hi!
Firstly, I'm sorry to bring up a topic once again, that has been on the forums probably over 9000 times.
Recently, there were a few outbreaks of adbot registration and adspam in threads. Knowing the advancements of web development tools available to the general public including script kiddies, I would once again like to recommend the compulsory use of CAPTCHA for registration. That would be a great deterrent to automated registration, and less work for the moderation staff, enabling them to focus more on user experience.

Also, the servers must be expensive with the current loads, as more and more nations register, consuming bandwidth, CPUs and hard drive space. To augment the existing advertisement and microtransaction based financing, I would also like to suggest implementing an SSO technology, like the now-populat Facebook connect. Facebook is the largest advertisement database (next to Google) known to man. Most users tend to blindly agree with any app permissions, so NationStates can use Facebook Connect to analyze the user's page information and showing them personalized ads (which users are more likely to click, thus bring more revenue), as well as passing on their facebook data to third parties for advertisement/market research purposes.

Before accusing me of being an advertiser myself, I'm not an employee of facebook, Inc.; Google Inc.; nor their affiliates or an advertiser company. I just know we live in a capitalist world.

I'm quite sure that there's people behind making those adbots and then they set the bot software loose on the nations created or the bots are that crafty these days. I've heard that it's the former that's why the bots are surfacing. Even if you have a CAPTCHA up on the creation page, the human operators will still get around that.

/not anything related to running NS

Standard text/words Captcha systems (e.g ReCaptcha) has been broken for some time, I've actually done side projects that evade and bypass Captcha systems. If you want a captcha system that has not been broken, see this:

http://www.confidenttechnologies.com/pr ... nt-captcha

Just posted this elsewhere:

Frisbeeteria wrote:

Souseiseki wrote:if i was violet i would have set up a draconian regime of captchas and regexes months ago so you're all probably pretty lucky i'm not

If these were actual bots, your suggestion would make sense. They're not. These are being posted by human beings, mostly in India, Pakistan, and China, who are paid to place these ads on various forums for the purpose of improving search engine rankings. They take the time to go through the entire nation creation process, go to the forums, usually post 3 times, and never come back. (The callgirl idiots post as many times as they can before deletion, so we appreciate early notification.) Captchas won't stop a human being from creating a nation, but they do make it harder for everyone else.

What we do is try to make their efforts as ineffective as possible. We delete the ads, kill the nation, and block the IP. I don't know if we actually manage to beat out the legitimate indexing bots (you've seen them in the Online list - Google [Bot], Google Adsense [Bot], Bing [Bot], etc) but we try our best. At least they won't have any ongoing presence on our forums.

I don't see how using Single Sign-On would prevent spam, if that's what you were saying. Our adbot users are hit-and-run posters using a wide variety of IP sources, so I doubt we'd block them any better using SSO. As an additional revenue source, perhaps - but that's a whole separate discussion, and one exclusively for management.

Unless I'm mistaken, in the past (probably in the Jolt era), didn't we have a way of combating adbots/spammers that required the mods to approve the first 5 or so posts of a new forum account before they showed up in a thread?

Northrop-Grumman wrote:Unless I'm mistaken, in the past (probably in the Jolt era), didn't we have a way of combating adbots/spammers that required the mods to approve the first 5 or so posts of a new forum account before they showed up in a thread?

We did, and it was disabled very quickly after we arrived. It's a moderation nightmare. I'd rather kill 4-5 daily adbots than have to approve 200 new puppets.

Frisbeeteria wrote:

Northrop-Grumman wrote:Unless I'm mistaken, in the past (probably in the Jolt era), didn't we have a way of combating adbots/spammers that required the mods to approve the first 5 or so posts of a new forum account before they showed up in a thread?

We did, and it was disabled very quickly after we arrived. It's a moderation nightmare. I'd rather kill 4-5 daily adbots than have to approve 200 new puppets.

Ah, I did remember correctly then, and yeah, after I posted that, I remembered it being a mess with the confusion over why posts weren't appearing right away by new folks and the extra workload put on the mods. I suspect it'd only be something to consider if we were getting utterly hammered by spam, but right now, it's pretty light and managable.