Lol

I like the s€x scene

Ewwwww.

I dont think this beats the horrors that show up in regular game chat though. They should just have a captcha system like this website I'm the mod for. The login process for the site requires a waiting captcha with a random time quanta set. There is no way for a robot to understand an image and interpret the amount of time to wait before it can log in.

We had a captcha system. The issue when you have games depending on the forums and 20~ million users, is that it really does very little. We ended up removing it a long time ago.

A timer would not work for us as it would either be circumvented very easily by just using registration of one of our games, or it would completely destroy our new player counts.

It's worth mentioning by the way for *most* sites, nobody bothers to write custom bots. Can just use a Q&A system and it's practically guaranteed no one will crack that then.

Sadly since SM's forum has 4+ ways of registering and is rather large, it's quite a different issue. Won't be for much longer though!

The main bot "killer" we had was a check on registration, but it seems to have gotten less good.


We'll make an extremely major change soon that will probably get rid of this problem for good.


Edit: I lied, the captcha's are still there apparently.

Yes but that's registration. There isn't a captcha for login process. I suggested putting one here. If a bot does figure out how to circumvent it the first time. You can always change types of captcha. We set up our forum so that the bots are able to stick around though. Mainly to understand the behavior and how they are programmed. Might help you here. it shocked us the amount bots that would continuously watch our forums though. @.@

Essentially when the bot enters it's information it has to complete a captcha of waiting or else it gets the label of being a robot. A robot has restricted access but and can not post.



https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/

^^
We used this one for a long time before switching to a more advanced one. No bots ever got through that one.

At least those posts are gone now.

Adding any form of limitation to the login process would not work for us... Imagine being one of the facebook or armorgames users that gets on the forums by using the integration.

Re-Captcha is very good, but not bullet proof at all. Nor is any other - the very nature of a computer-created protection, is that a computer can always break it as well ;P


Keep in mind we are the target of specialized bots, lots of them.

Frankly, fully solving this on these forums is a serious task that would take a lot of time - time we do not want to spend. We're game makers, not forum makers. We should not spend too much time on a forum instead

For that reason we'll be moving towards a more permanent solution, so we don't have to worry about bots.