Negima, with the large number of bot registrations recently (at least 30% of all registrations last time I checked a few weeks ago, I did this manually, one at a time) it will be a lot of work to check accounts manually, one at a time, and to keep up on them manually as they come in. Which is why I'd like to automate this process (and make sure I can minimize the inconvenience to our members) if possible.
No, not every user with 0 posts is a bot, but every user with 0 posts who isn't a bot can re-register, and post to avoid getting purged again. There isn't really any point to registering if you are just going to lurk.
ICQ is an IM platform/client, like AIM or MSN Messenger. They've been around a while. Thanks for noticing that. If most of these spam registrations are related, and if we are lucky it will be easier to block them.
Obijay, we have image verification, or visual confirmation already. It's one of the features they actually added to the board software that I didn't have to install a modification to get. If you log out you can pretend to register and see it. Unfortunately, it appears to be useless (but it's probably effective at blocking blind users if any tried to sign up.
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Leashy, a bot is an automated process that registers accounts on a whole lot of message boards for the purpose of spamming us. I'm not sure if I could explain
how they do it. But all phpBB boards, for example, are pretty much the same. So it's pretty easy to automatically locate them and attempt to register. That's just computers nowadays, you can automate everything.
You may have noticed the occasional spam post, but our moderators are pretty good at catching those and getting rid of them. That's what they do. They also advertise for websites of rather loose morals by posting websites in their profile. The advantage to them in this is those links will get spidered by Google and other search engines and increase their ranking in those search engines. They don't actually contribute to our community here, they just try to make a buck or two off of collectively advertising pornography or dating services or viagra, whatever, on thousands of message boards like ours. Some of this stuff, like the pornography, we have a responsibility to keep out of here. They abuse the system we have here and invade our community with things of an unwanted nature, which is the biggest reason for shutting down guest posting.
Yes, if a bot registers it could then post. The potential threat being that the unscrupulous company that controls the bot is selling advertising, says it can get your service listed on tens of thousands of boards, then it goes and registers sleeper accounts all over the place and when it finds a client it makes posts with the sleeper accounts. Unless we've been good with our housekeeping and recognized them before they've had a chance to attack. Or, as I mentioned with the search engine scam, they only need to get their info from a profile registered. If the same web link is listed on thousands of boards, that potentially increases the advertiser's search engine rank and thus revenue.
There are other kinds of bots, but those are the ones we are talking about in this context. They aren't all bad, but in terms of message boards, they are almost always undesirable. Though I did once see a resident forum bot that would respond to user posts and try to pretend to be a human. In that it was installed by the board owner and its nature was transparant, it was pretty fun.
More on bots in general:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot
