^Yes, same here, people don't seem to get it. The bots are somehow all bypassing it.
just a note: a couple of fixes are available for registration security questions plugin (
1 &
2)
and there is an alternate plugin for the same purpose -
Signup Questions
(2013-11-27, 09:48 AM)Tomm M Wrote: [ -> ]I can confirm that the SFS plugin does work as intended. As long as the SFS service is up, the username/email/ip address exists in its DB and the confidence score is breached, registration will be denied.
Remember to use a mix of spam protection plugins to help protect any online form you have on your website. ReCAPTCHA alone cannot be trusted 100% of the time.
okay this may be stupid on my part
but i just installed the stop forum spam plugin, i didnt put any registration anywhere nor did i see it. Soo... where do I register? I went on the site itself and they said no api keys are being given except to forum members? Maybe thats why it didnt stop SQUAT lol...
When i installed fassim and got the api key... thats what helped me reduce down to 1-2 registrations a day.
Also security question you say was fixed? So there was a flaw... as it seems it shows no questions are being even answered even the new ones i made its like a boom bypass.
The SFS plugin works regardless of API key. Lower the confidence score if you're still seeing spam registrations.
The plugin will not work if the SFS service is unavailable.
The automatic process that bots use is intelligent. They store correct answers to your questions in databases to reference later; they can break ReCAPTCHA (and most others); they will register and slowly post to avoid detection; DDoS Guard and Cloudflare can't be trusted to stop them.
The best thing you can do is active moderation. Review the members regularly; setup views for non-empty signatures/website fields for recent registrations; report suspicious members by using Goodbye Spammer (available built-in with MyBB 1.8). By sharing information about who is spamming your forum it will help protect other forums.
I looked into my own forum's stats. I run SFS and Register Time.
Over the last 2 weeks I've averaged 1 user, per day, that is spam related. Averaged 182 spam registrations stopped per day.
(2013-11-28, 08:47 AM)Tomm M Wrote: [ -> ]The SFS plugin works regardless of API key. Lower the confidence score if you're still seeing spam registrations.
The plugin will not work if the SFS service is unavailable.
The automatic process that bots use is intelligent. They store correct answers to your questions in databases to reference later; they can break ReCAPTCHA (and most others); they will register and slowly post to avoid detection; DDoS Guard and Cloudflare can't be trusted to stop them.
The best thing you can do is active moderation. Review the members regularly; setup views for non-empty signatures/website fields for recent registrations; report suspicious members by using Goodbye Spammer (available built-in with MyBB 1.8). By sharing information about who is spamming your forum it will help protect other forums.
I certainly believe the intelligent bot you describe exists, but I noticed there are actually a lot of human spammers from low-wage countries (just look at the memberbase of
Digitalpoint). These human spammers fill in the CAPTCHA, answer security questions and adjust the spam posts to the subject of the forum. The security questions might shield them occasionally as they get lost in translation though.
Also, I read CAPTCHA breaking services (they rely on Amazon Mechanical Turk users) break CAPTCHA's for dollarcents.
So I just wanted to follow up with my previous post. I installed the "Checkbox Plugin" and my spam registrants went from 80+ per day to 0. I registered a fake account and it works fine for a human. It has only been one day so far, but I know without it I would have been flooded again this morning.
The Checkbox Plugin is relatively un-obtrusive as well. Not nearly as annoying as reCaptcha for sure.
Can a few others install this and see if it helps them as well?