How do you stop spammers from other countries? (1 Viewing)

MapleDots

MapleDots

MapleDots.ca
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Today was a big day for the board, we have officially hit the world stage.
I had to delete 41 registrations today and a number of spam messages on the board from foreign IP addresses.


So I implemented a very simple fix and within moments the registrations stopped.

How did I do this incredible feat of engineering you ask?


I made two security questions, answer one wrong and the other one comes up.


1. What province starts and ends with the letter "A" ?

2. What province starts and ends with the letter "O" ?


I had to think a little bit ouside of the box and come up with questions that typical Canadians could answer but most foreigners could not.
Now lets just hope they do not discover google :lol:


It stopped the bots or spammers cold in their tracks.


PLEASE DO NOT POST THE ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS
 
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I think any question would halt them, as these spammers use 'bots that auto-register using known forum conventions.
 
yeah, I just got asked one of the questions just trying to make a post... would be nice to disable that for known users?
 
MapleDots said:
You should only get it once per cookie session, so as long as the cookie is valid it should not ask again.

Post back here if it asks more than once.
Click to expand...

I posted a message but I don't see it actually posted.. I think maybe the spam question caused my post to be lost.

I hit submit on my post - that's when the spam question popped up. Then I never noticed that the message was posted. Not sure what exactly happened there.
 
rlm said:
I posted a message but I don't see it actually posted.. I think maybe the spam question caused my post to be lost.

I hit submit on my post - that's when the spam question popped up. Then I never noticed that the message was posted. Not sure what exactly happened there.
Click to expand...

I ran some tests and it works as designed. I think you posted as I was making some code changes so there was probably a momentary conflict.

I think all is resolved and the system should only ask the question to someone new that is registering and when you wipe your cookie aka go incognito or the cookie expires. All in all you should hardly ever be asked and the post should not go lost again.

Please everyone report here if you are having any issues or are asked a security question more than once.
 
It definitely wasn't the first post, as I had just posted a bit earlier. Not sure what happened. I just remember having made several posts, during one of them got asked the spam question, then noticing that one of my posts was never posted. I don't know if it was something I did (like close the window before posting) or if it was the spam question - but I _think_ it wasn't me closing the window before hitting send and I _think_ it was the spam question...
 
I was still doing work on the coding so I would not be surprised if we conflicted. Especially because you had posted earlier and I had to reactivate the script a few times which means it reset the cookie while in use, that always causes unexpected results.

Again report anything unusual and I will recheck
 
MapleDots said:
I was still doing work on the coding so I would not be surprised if we conflicted. Especially because you had posted earlier and I had to reactivate the script a few times which means it reset the cookie while in use, that always causes unexpected results.

Again report anything unusual and I will recheck
Click to expand...

Yeah, hopefully it was just a quirk with resetting cookies & working on the code.
 
I got asked once about “what planet” but not again since
 
Working fine for me, I've never seen the questions so I assume everything is working.
 
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