Bricks in Motion
We are a friendly filmmaking community devoted to the art of stop-motion animation using LEGO® and similar construction toys. Here, you can share your work, join our community of other brickfilmers, and participate in periodic animation contests!
A place to discuss, share, and create stop motion films.
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If you registered but have never made a post on the forum, your account was probably deleted today in the process of cleaning out all the old spambot accounts. Sorry about this; re-registering with the same username will fix the problem.
It would be interesting to know how many accounts were deleted
There was about 5k accounts. Now, there is only about 2.5k.
Actually, there were about 7,500 accounts originally. Having a lot of accounts with spam links in the profiles, etc. can be detrimental to SEO which was the primary reason for cleaning it up. I've made some other tweaks to the site as well, and I'm hoping we can eradicate the spam problem here for good. (Currently, we're manually approving every account, which is a pain)
Trust us, those spambots are getting more clever
I wrote a sort of custom captcha a while ago on another site we're all aware of, which required the user joining to awnser a simple math problem. That worked for a few months, no spam users were getting in, but for some reason the floodgates just opened all of sudden. It could be an idea to try a similar approach on here, although I don't know how long it'd last for.
Thing about Captcha is it's suppose to prevent spambots, not humans, from being able to solve. There are, unfortunately, humans being paid by spammers to solve Captcha. People in India and China are being paid to solve these captcha problems. Math captchas won't even reduce the success rate of spam-bot registration prevention if Indians and Chinese are involved. 
Your custom captcha probably worked fine against automation, not against human.
Yeah I think Lech is right in that they're using humans to get past the captcha.
It looks like the new anti-spam extension wasn't much of a help either, though. It uses hidden fields and a spambot listing instead of captcha, but there were three spambot registrations when I just checked.
I've seen some sites that have a LEGO trivia question of some kind as the captcha, like "what does AFOL stand for." I don't know what would really work for us, though, as there are people who come to this site who aren't really LEGO enthusiasts anyway.
If I was a determined asian dude, I'd probably just google the answer for any trivia questions...
Hey, I had an idea for a trivia question. "What is Smeagol's favorite thing to chat about?" 
Which wouldn't really work. Most people that join here are newbies, and wouldn't know much about filming, etc, so questions about filming wouldn't work really, either. I should think the current system of manual authorization works fine, as long as new members come on the chat room when Smeagol is around.
Last edited by rogeralans (September 23, 2012 (04:23pm))
Just out of interest, how can manually approving accounts reduce the problem of spambots?
Just out of interest, how can manually approving accounts reduce the problem of spambots?
Well, I would think that if a spambot can't post, then it can't post. Unless we are worried about spam accounts clogging up the site, which wouldn't be affected by the manual approved system.
It's pretty easy to tell if a new account is a spambot or not based on username, email, and IP address. We delete the spambots and clear the non-bots to be able to post. It's just a pain because it has to be done manually on a routine.
Hey, I had an idea for a trivia question. "What is Smeagol's favorite thing to chat about?"
That's easy. Lighting techniques.
rogeralans wrote:Hey, I had an idea for a trivia question. "What is Smeagol's favorite thing to chat about?"
That's easy. Lighting techniques.
Luckily My account wasn't deleted 'cause usually i dont post things alot so...
Luckily My account wasn't deleted 'cause usually i dont post things alot so...
Only accounts that have never posted have been deleted. I don't see the point in creating an account that has made no posts anyway, but hey-ho.
Yeah, it surprised me just how many people make an account and then never, ever post. Like, a majority of the registered users. Even if you don't count spambots. It would have been nice to not delete the real people who registered but have yet to post, but it wasn't feasible to look at each individual account like that with this many. I wanted to delete the spam accounts because their profiles link to spammy sites. Having thousands of links on your website to spam sites is detrimental to search engine rankings.
Do some of them rate videos, perhaps?
Yeah, there are reasons to register, for instance so you can keep track of what you've read and rate films. Deleting all these accounts was sort of a last resort, but hopefully the effects won't be too far-reaching.
Would their deletion have wiped their ratings or is that a separate database?
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