Does Twitter bring spam bots?

Justin

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I wanted to know if other admins had a problem with twitter sending spam bots to you forum.

I have had a huge problem with that. It is the biggest problem on my forum until I stepped up enforcement.
 
I have yet to have that problem. Although it just goes to show you you should be careful about where and how you advertise.
 
Spambots are quite special. There is special systems that some clever spambots can get into. This allows them to somehow be on a website without them even being signed up.
 
yes it does in my sites experiences. we signed up to twitter and found that afterwards we had an influx of spambots :/

however some may not have this problem personally we did 🙁
 
I believe they 'can', but spambots can appear from anywhere your link is posted on the Internet.
 
First of all... Spam bots sign up.
Spam bots are set up by real people. The program signs up using random and fake info.

Spammers have all different settings for different type of forums...
 
Everywhere you advertise will increase the number of unwanted traffic and spam bots. If you only post one like around the internet to your site then you won't get much if any spam. If you post 1000 links, you will get alot. 10,000 you will get even more.

No spam protection stops 100% of spam. Bots are getting smarter. Anything that works good now, might not a month or year down the line or it might not be as efficient. Also quite often humans sign up with a specific password and username and a bot come along later and spams the forum. Additionally with image CAPTCHA, apparently the spammers add a system to their website where they encourage their users to break the CAPTCHA on another forum. For example, the person who set up the spam bot owns a video sharing site or something. A spam bot tries to sign up to a random forum and it can't answer the captcha and then they show that captcha to a user on their own site. They answer it thinking that it is to show that they are not a bot but actually they have just helped crack that image and they can now sign up to that forum. The person who answered it did it to watch a video and didn't know they just help a bot sign up. If you get real members to your forum, you will get bots on your forum.
 
Aha great post Fowler.

I see what some of you are getting too. I was spam free for like 3 weeks when it opened, and as soon as I twittered a link, we had a spam attack. Doesn't that seem even a little suspicous?
 
It may just be coincidence and you don't get attacked by spammers straight away. Such as if you post your email for example of this forum, you wonn't start getting spam emails instantly. It may take days but when they start it will be quite alot of emails a day. They may have found your link on initially twitter but they were going to find your link at some point anyway whether you actually posted it on twitter or not.
 
NewKirk said:
Aha great post Fowler.

I see what some of you are getting too. I was spam free for like 3 weeks when it opened, and as soon as I twittered a link, we had a spam attack. Doesn't that seem even a little suspicious?
Heh, whatever you're doing to attract those spam-bots, Andrew, is working quite well. Yet another spam attack this morning (I cleaned it up so don't worry). Those spam bots must like you. I wonder if discontinueing advertisement on twitter would decrease this? It might be worth a try for a week or two, I don't know. Just as long as it brings plenty of traffic I don't mind cleaning up those bots for you though. :biggrin:
 
ah Thanks 🙂 The thing is I quit updating our Twitter a week ago 😛
 
NewKirk said:
ah Thanks 🙂 The thing is I quit updating our Twitter a week ago 😛
It's safe to say we've had at least three, maybe four, spam-bots since then.
 
If you do get massive spam (where ever it's source) you should install some better anti spam protection. We are on twitter with many links to us and we are linked from thousands of forums and we get a small amount of spam here daily. If we stick with the default phpBB captcha we would have alot though.
 
Fowler said:
If you do get massive spam (where ever it's source) you should install some better anti spam protection. We are on twitter with many links to us and we are linked from thousands of forums and we get a small amount of spam here daily. If we stick with the default phpBB captcha we would have alot though.
Do you have any suggestions?
 
Fowler said:
Here is a topic with multiple mods - http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=1437125

We have a question and answer mod here which does the job.
Thanks. I just set up a custom profile field on the forum to force confirmation that they aren't bots. I hope that helps. (It uses the drop-down box function with a default answer which is invalid.) Maybe we'll get less than two spam attacks a day now.
 
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