1 Topic by joan

  • joan
  • joan
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Hi everyone!

You may not realize this but the forum is constantly harassed by spam bots trying to post their links.

There are more than 10 new bots that register every single day on the forum and try to post messages. This has been going on for years and I have implemented many counter measures directly in the forum software code (which is unmaintained by the creators but I like its simplicity), so hopefully you shouldn't see any spam.

I catch some of them at registration time, others I catch when they fill their profile and signature, and others I catch when they post their first message. There is a secret sub-forum where they all end up together.

By the way if you are a human and your message is nowhere to be seen after you post, send me an email at the address at the bottom of the page so I can move it back into the main forum manually.

That being said since a few weeks there is a new form of attack I had never seen before, using AI / ChatGPT. The bot is making an actual answer by quoting the original question. The answer is looking normal and is vaguely on topic. But then they sneakily change the original question inside the quote to insert a link. Sometimes changing the font color so it is invisible. Sometimes they don't do it outright, they first post the answer and then come back a few days later and change the text in the quote. Very sneaky.

Obviously I would rather work on Kinovea than deal with this, and I don't want to restore the registration block where I had to manually validate every new registration, there is just too many bots to handle it manually. So if you see a suspiciously weird message don't hesitate to click the "report" link so I can have a look.

Thank you!
Joan.

2 Reply by petecrowe

  • petecrowe
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That's the last thing a hard working, very intelligent developer who has made available the fruits of his labors to the community at large needs. I'm sorry for the extra work it takes for you to keep these losers at bay.

Is there a way you can do a site wide search for the hex code for transparent text to help quickly identify some of these bots? That may work for a few of them.

Perhaps you can enlist the help of some Kinovea users to help admin the site to assist in verifying account creation attempts?

Thank you for the work you do.

3 Reply by joan

  • joan
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Verifying account creation isn't sustainable, it's what I did for several years but now there is just too much volume. I just double checked the numbers, for the month of July alone I got 982 registration mail alerts. I'm not reading them. These are only the ones that manage to pass the captcha. About half of them go to a special honey pot page I set up but the rest is still too much. So we need to wait until they make their first move and reveal themselves.

The frustrating part is that the bots continue to attack even if it doesn't work. The website must be in spammers database somewhere and they just don't care if their attempts fail.

Some of the bots are also never posting but use the report button on random posts and put a link in the "reason" field, that doesn't make any sense, only a forum admin/mod can read this… I hope they don't start to do this more often.