Stopping Bots

I’ve got a python script running every x minutes that will remove non-confirmed +3days. It also checks popular bot email addresses. If you notice any patterns please post them. I’m in the process of checking bots that request confirmation with the normal bot keywords.

#Bot Patterns

@Andrew_Stacey I noticed under Activity that you approved a lot of users that had 520 in their name. Are they legitimate or did you hit approve instead of decline. Just wondering because I decline a lot of users at one time.

Oh smeg. I almost certainly hit the wrong link.

I think I have fixed my error.

It looks like “ggsmfbeyg” isn’t here to learn anything.

Deleted user “ggsmfbegy” and all of their content. It was several posts of nonsense.

Deleted another user that was starting to spam the forum with several posts. I didn’t write down the name, but it was mostly a bunch of letters and numbers.

By the way: in case you don’t know you can bulk-select all applicants by pressing the word “Action” in header field. I just found this out and it’s saved me a ton of clicking.

@Simeon I’ve been doing that already. When I check the forum in the morning, I sometimes see as many as 30 that need a decline. I accept the legitimate users first, then decline the rest.

@dave1707 they are pretty out of control. I’ll start looking into ways to stop this. (Thank you for declining so many.)

@Simeon I’ve probably declined at least another 400 in the last 3 hrs. It seems that if I go any length of time without looking, there’s 100-200 of them waiting to be declined. I think that by the time I go to bed tonight, I’ll decline over 1000 at this rate. It’s kind of easy. Select them all, look thru the list to see if there’s any legitimate applicants, if not then decline them. Any legitimate applicants can be unselected before declining the spammers.

They seem to be targeting the iAds thread, so I’ve closed it.

@Simeon I probably declined over 200 applicants so far today and the day isn’t over yet. I’m not sure how things are setup that so many are getting that far. Also, when I look at the user list, why are there so many with a role of “Confirmation required” and how do they get to that point.

@dave1707 I had a script running on a work computer that was removing confirmation pendings that were over a day old. I’ll get it running again.

@Briarfox How do they get into a “Confirmation required” status. When I have an applicant waiting to be accepted, I don’t see them in the user list until they’re accepted.

@dave1707 I believe they go into confirmation required when they sign up. If the confirm with email then they go to applicants.

@Briarfox It looks like you hit the wrong button and accepted a lot of users instead of declining them.

Removed one of the spammers that created a advertising discussion.

Doh! Wish the accept and decline were a little further apart!

@Briarfox No problem. I was going to go thru the user list and start deleting some of the junk later on when I have nothing better to do.