Bots keep making an account and advertise on forum

[dandsk]

Every damn day bots keep making accounts, getting past captcha and email verification, and posting random advertising in gibberish on the forums. Specifically in the Off-Topic section.

Here is what pretty much each of their forum posts look like. It's always advertising for penis, muscular pills, etc.

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It's barely understandable! I am using phpBB forum software, and if you want a look it's hosted here. Edit: Link removed.

What I am asking is how to stop these bots from getting past account registration. Should I increase capcha difficulty, or what?

Btw, at least 5 bots make accounts daily. These are some of their names:

Louisecear
CarolynKn
Robertma
Georgekic
DebbieSa
MonicaMn

What's interesting is that they were made to fill in almost every part of their account. A location is put in, legal, age, occupation, icq, and interests. What is also interesting is that all of their email accounts that were used to register the account are from mail.ru. Are these bots being sent from some lousy advertiser in Russia?

TL;DR - Bots are spamming my forum daily. They make accounts, fill in all required information as if they were a human, and start advertising in the Off-Topic section about pills. I am thinking of increasing capcha difficulty, but I honestly don't know. These bots look like they were made to pass any of phpBB's built in capchas.

Here is a picture of the posts:

Edit: Image removed

[kraze]

Give this a go;
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=1437125

I used these techniques on an old forum of mine and it stopped all automated spam. I found that the custom profile field worked the best. Something simple as "What's 2+4" did the trick.

[dandsk]

Went with Q&A.

Let's see how this goes...

[dandsk]

What the heck! Over 4 new spam accounts have been made with the Q&A system in place.

Now most of them are about Viagra pills! I'm going to try another solution.

[kraze]

You should be using a combination of anti-spam techniques. So add Captcha to the mix, and if that still doesn't work add another custom profile field. Try doing something like "Pick the middle number"

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[dandsk]

Yeah, instead of wasting some time thinking of good questions bots can't search up on Google, I went and put up reCaptcha.

Hopefully this works.

Thanks for the help, kraze!

[kraze]

No problem. Do let us know if it doesn't work. We should be able to find some better solutions.

[XDE4TH]

Just as an additional idea/solution either for the op or anyone else who finds this thread and has the same problem. Granted my links are for vB4, but I'm sure similar solutions can be found for phpBB. I managed to solve this for my clan with a combination of....

1) Verify Email Before Registration - It requests the user to enter their Email on the first screen. It then sends them to a second regular registration screen. Except instead of asking for the EMail address here, it asks for a code it sent the address from the first screen. It is my guess that bots have a hard time grabbing this normal text and pasting it into the field on a second page.
In the 4 months since installing this I have only seen 1 spam account get pass and successfully register. I have seen multiple accounts stuck in the pending Email Verification group(which we set to automatically get deleted after 5 days) which shows that it is working.

2) Akismet - The one account that did get pass the registration was caught by Akismet and was put into moderation and never posted. We banned the account. This service has only flagged one false positive that we simply just approved.

just some other options.

[silentwisher]

Well just to throw this in here as a potential all else fails suggestion...
I use mybb and it works pretty good at keeping bots out, so well that I normally dont get more than 1 bot every like 2-3 months.