Forum Downtime

Did anyone else notice the forums were down for awhile? We've had some bots on here recently, so I bet that had something to do with it, but was anything major changed?

Yes, the forums were locked, most every spambot and their posts were removed, but nothing more than that that I am aware of.

Yes, I was on IRC during that period.

The forums were down for maintenance because AJ was making preventive countermeasures against bots, so that they hopefully won't come on again.

Ah. Good.

ah good. now to wait for the main contest wad.

Sooo... I take it I just missed the bot motherlode? I mean, the bot sticky grew, like, four pages overnight, so I guess I must have...

Shadow Hog, we had a massive flood of posts all from bots earlier. About 30+ posts in one day if I remember. All in seperate threads, cluttering them all up. It was horrible.

It was terible but hopefully the forum is now bot proof.

Stupid bot's!

ummm... What is a spambot? I would PM someone but I never get anything back.

A Spambot is an automated program made to register on random forums for the sole reason of advertising weight-loss pills, porn, or life insurance policies.
Sometimes they'll be blunt about it, and just post 50 or so links to their products. Most of which is in HTML or other forum code that doesn't work here.
Other times, they'll try to be sneaky. Which is inanely futile.
And they somehow seem to think that mentioning the name of the domain and the forum proves they're not spambots.

Senior Spambot said:

Hello!
This is a lovely website, "ssntails.sepwich.com". I love the name, and the subject!
I've been wondering what to post in "Off-Topic". I'm new, you see.
I hope we can be great friends. :)

<href="http://www.genericweightlosspills.com/28664581randomnumbers.html">This is my website. I hope you like it!</href>

Click to expand...

And then they never post again. But there are more spambots where that came from.
Another typical sign of a spambot is that they have an ICQ number. Always.

There has been technology to help prevent this unwanted spam. Such as pictures with randomly generated letters and numbers, which you must enter into a box.
However, the sons of buggers will sometimes use image-reading technology to identify the letters and numbers. So to fight back at this, some use letters and numbers that are heavily distorted. But sometimes the distortion is so severe, not even humans can enter the right sequnce.

What SSNTails has added to the registeration process is a picture of Sonic with the caption "Who is this guy? Enter his 5-letter name into the box below". This should confuse spambots quite a bit, unless they're manually registered.
In which case, it's costing them more effort than it's costing us. Since deleting a topic is but two clicks.

Now lets ban the bots.
If they arent banned yet.

They don't need to be banned. The bots have already been removed from the forum.

Since you said they're just a program, Do all of them say that exact thing and then post their pop up?

You could say that in way.

Nice job to SSN for coming up with the one thing that all bots would get wrong but all users here would get right.

But what if someone new to Sonic can't answer the question? Okay, I'm done with that joke.

SRB2-Playah said:

Another typical sign of a spambot is that they have an ICQ number. Always.

Click to expand...

SPAMBOT! D:


I believe what SSN did was change the url to the signup page, among other things...

Calm down.
He might be a USER.
I think those spambots are ICQ spambots too.

Zaktan said:

Calm down.
He might be a USER.
I think those spambots are ICQ spambots too.

Click to expand...

<Insert Omega's trusty 'Killed the Joke' macro here>

Or better yet, make your own! =3