Holy....

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jordsta95 said:
Not to mention even if captchas did work, they are forcing harder and harder to read captchas for real people, as spammer, create programs to read the "easy" one, then there needs to be a harder to read captcha, which the program gets updated to read, and the captcha needs to be made harder to read... and the cycle continues.
I struggle to read most captchas nowadays... I remember about 5-10 years ago a captcha was something like:
Whs8FGs1
And that would stop spammers. But captchas are outdated, and impossible to read nowadays. Especially with the terrible fonts in most of them "Is that an 'f' or a 't'. and 'a' or an 'o'"
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And the ones with slightly different colors are impossible for people like me who can't see the difference between them. I've failed numerous CAPTCHAs because they aren't setup for colorblind people.
 
Padfoote said:
And the ones with slightly different colors are impossible for people like me who can't see the difference between them. I've failed numerous CAPTCHAs because they aren't setup for colorblind people.
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Oh I totally forgot about that. They should always be black and white, because think about those odd 1 in a million (probably more than 1 mill) people who are COLOURblind, as in they only see stuff in greyscale :/
 
Padfoote said:
And the ones with slightly different colors are impossible for people like me who can't see the difference between them. I've failed numerous CAPTCHAs because they aren't setup for colorblind people.
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jordsta95 said:
Oh I totally forgot about that. They should always be black and white, because think about those odd 1 in a million (probably more than 1 mill) people who are COLOURblind, as in they only see stuff in greyscale :/
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What about the disability mode that plays an audio file? I've never seen a CAPTCHA which doesn't have that, besides FTB wiki's old system (the one that relied on questions about FTB and community).

Edit: Also, way more than one in a million ;)
 
jordsta95 said:
Oh I totally forgot about that. They should always be black and white, because think about those odd 1 in a million (probably more than 1 mill) people who are COLOURblind, as in they only see stuff in greyscale :/
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It's a fairly significant portion of males that are colorblind, so more than a million. :p
Nerixel said:
What about the disability mode that plays an audio file? I've never seen a CAPTCHA which doesn't have that, besides FTB wiki's old system (the one that relied on questions about FTB and community).

Edit: Also, way more than one in a million ;)
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Forgot about those. NoScript blocks them for me I think.
 
Padfoote said:
It's a fairly significant portion of males that are colorblind, so more than a million. :p


Forgot about those. NoScript blocks them for me I think.
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I know that, but I didn't mean colourblind to blue or green (most common ones) I meant they couldn't see colour at all...
I think it's like 1 in 100 people who are colourblind :P
 
Yusunoha said:
I fear the moment they learn how to send private messages
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I know this isn't said in total seriousness, but just in case people are curious, the bots we usually get won't bother with PMs. They're SEO bots and thus need to post in public. PMs get them nothing as their clients are paying them to build "organic links", not actually hawk their products. This, by the way, is why they're perfectly okay with posting total gibberish as long as their URLs and a couple keywords get in there, and why my (unpopular) suggestion for dealing with the spambot issue is to simply not allow new users to post URLs until they've made a handful of other posts first (it's unpopular because it precludes new users from making bug reports; I haven't dug through the modules for how XenForo handles it but on my vBulletin forums this is something I can handle granularly on a per-forum basis so I can make especial exceptions like that).

The ones that would actually futz around in PM -- actual advertising bots -- aren't all that common anymore (their era was 10 years ago, give or take), particularly on forums with niche demographics and smaller user bases (which, in the grand scheme of things, this one is). That said, one of the default checkbox functions on our Spam Cleaner button is to delete any and all PMs they have sent, so if we were to get a wave of adbots and people use the in-Conversation Report function we can deal with those without needing to involve direct admin intervention (Reports from a Conversation include the specific single post that is reported, so we can see that much to verify before culling).

And, speaking of spambots, since I'm going to sleep now (it's 1:30am in my part of the world) the rest of the ones for tonight are up to other folks with access to the Spam button to nuke. =)
 
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Vauthil said:
I know this isn't said in total seriousness, but just in case people are curious, the bots we usually get won't bother with PMs. They're SEO bots and thus need to post in public. PMs get them nothing as their clients are paying them to build "organic links", not actually hawk their products. This, by the way, is why they're perfectly okay with posting total gibberish as long as their URLs and a couple keywords get in there, and why my (unpopular) suggestion for dealing with the spambot issue is to simply not allow new users to post URLs until they've made a handful of other posts first (it's unpopular because it precludes new users from making bug reports; I haven't dug through the modules for how XenForo handles it but on my vBulletin forums this is something I can handle granularly on a per-forum basis so I can make especial exceptions like that).

The ones that would actually futz around in PM -- actual advertising bots -- aren't all that common anymore (their era was 10 years ago, give or take), particularly on forums with niche demographics and smaller user bases (which, in the grand scheme of things, this one is). That said, one of the default checkbox functions on our Spam Cleaner button is to delete any and all PMs they have sent, so if we were to get a wave of adbots and people use the in-Conversation Report function we can deal with those without needing to involve direct admin intervention (Reports from a Conversation include the specific single post that is reported, so we can see that much to verify before culling).

And, speaking of spambots, since I'm going to sleep now (it's 1:30am in my part of the world) the rest of the ones for tonight are up to other folks with access to the Spam button to nuke. =)
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I wish I could help more, but alas no :(
 
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CoolSquid said:
Are all links here marked with nofollow? We don't want to help those bots.
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I just tested a spam post with this tool (perfectly relevant name, by the way), it looks like links in posts are nofollow. Others, like navigation links, however, are follow.

Edit: Considering how fast the spam posts are removed anyway, I'd be surprised if bots got to it before it got removed.
 
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