Twokinds ARCHIVE Forums

Tom, I may be an utter newbie, but... are you always this awesome? Seriously, I must carry this concept to other boards, so that the bot-plague will, if not be stopped, at least be nerfed.

So does having several hundred/thousand bot accounts do anything to the forum other than clutter up the Memberlist? I would assume phpbb has a max limit # of accounts any forum can have at a time, even if it is astronomically high.

Then again, accounts could just count towards the amount of storage a forum is allowed. Hm...

Kick A** Tom, you beat the system. Now all that needs to be done is to weed out the bots in the member list, but that can wait until another time If you or the mods aren't too bothered by it. ((though I seriously doubt you're ok with it))

It would take a good long time to sift through the memberlist. >_>

Grab some coffee, whoever's up for it. :grin:

DONT WORRY THAT HUMAN QUESTION TOM PUT UP WILL STOP THEM :roll: \

Well, sort of. The only limit is what the database(Most likely a MySQL one) can handle, which is rediculously high, and the space it takes up. I suppose each extra user means that viewing the memberlist and or some other pages may be a tiny bit slower(On the scale of a few processor cycles), but I don't think there is any real hard limit to the number - Though, it depends on how things are set up, and there may be a limit at either 2,147,483,648, or 4,294,967,296(32 bit integer limits). Of course, if its set up differently... no clue.
Still, I don't think a few thousand accounts will make much difference at all.


Also, who says its *just* bots? I know that the capcha tech will stop most every bot around, but bot-makers have gotten clever: What if you have your bot go to these hundreds of different forums, load up the register page, and "copy" the images and fill in boxes onto a single page. You then have a very low payed human look at each of these images, and fill in the letters in the boxes. You could even set up a system to look for these special questions, however due to the fact that these questions all have different codes, this type of thing is much harder to do.
Also, as a note, it isn't hard to create a script to register an account on a forum, even with the capcha tech - I created one a while back(It required intervention however for the capcha image).
[Note: In case you are wondering, the script in question would register on a IPB(I built it for forumer forums) forum, using a dummy email it created on mailinator, and a random name and password. And, it was built as a function, so it could easily be used to register as many accounts as needed for any purpose. Scary stuff, and ridiculously simple].


-RobbieThe1st

Oh God that sounds like the gold farmers in WoW, XD Too bad the employees haven't gotten bright enough to learn to copy/paste their spam message out of url brackets.

CAPTCHA's practically broken now anyway. OCR's reached the point that particularly well designed bots can get through it without much trouble. It's why CAPTCHA combined with arithmetic is becoming popular in some parts of the 'Net. I'm going to guess that the users are generally referenced by a userid number, which is probably an INT in MySQL. That makes the maximum number one of the 32 bit integer limits that Robbie mentioned. We aren't in danger of hitting two billion user accounts.

kind of frightening really, if you look at the member list by post count in ascending order you dont even see an account with 2 posts till page 84.

and apparently we have a member named "SEX--MASTER"

What we really need to do is kill the problem at the source, take the ip address and find out where these bot-makers live. Then we kill them, in the most in-humane way possible. Don't worry, no one will notice they are gone, they wont be missed.

Actually, I would assume everyone would notice they are gone. No they won't be missed, as everyone will be overjoyed and partying...

Well, ofcourse WE would notice that they are gone. But no one would personally notice that they have gone missing IRL and attempt to find them, or even care..

Id be rejoicing by opening a bottle of rum and having a party! Cheers!

Being an amateur sadist of some skill, I'm sure I can come up with some appropriately long, slow, excruciating methods of execution. Which, given some of the readers of this forum may have weak stomachs and/or no desire to have mental images that come out of my twisted thoughts, I will not go into great detail about.

I grew up on the comic called "Johnny the homicidal maniac"

Nny's got the right idea, but he lacks involvement with his victims. That, and he's just crazy.

Or perhaps he's horribly, horribly sane?