Bots

[Largo]

Larry and Joe;

I really feel for you guys. I've seen two bots on the forum already this evening. I had to shut down my own website because of those stupid things.

[hooligan]

You have a website? What's the url, www.scubathugswanted.com?

[joemamma]

Originally Posted by hooligan

You have a website? What's the url, www.scubathugswanted.com?

well I tried to apply! sounds like my kinda job, but alas the link doesn't work!

[Empacher]

Bots?

[navyhmc]

Are bots anything like Desmonda?

[CFDAlden]

Bots are computer systems that go out and try to register and post to every place they can find. Forums, Guestbooks, Calenders, whatever.

They then spam posts to whatever they're tryong to sell. Porn, usually.

I had to change a few things on the divevermont.com website to stop them. Took a bit to figure out how, lol.

[TommyB]

We have processes in place here on the forums for scubatoys to handle about 80% of the bots. Forum is on a linux system , so it makes it a little easier to handle the bots.

What's a little harder is the human that enters the spam
But most of that can be handled by blocking the anon proxies, and blocking the offending countries IP ranges for that host.

TommyB

[LRDWILDER]

Wow thats pretty cool...never realized that running a site was such a pain in the A*&

[scubadiver888]

Originally Posted by LRDWILDER

Wow thats pretty cool...never realized that running a site was such a pain in the A*&

There are NUMEROUS problems with it. You really have to be quite tech savvy nowadays.

Just today I was looking at the home page for my company website. There were hundreds of hidden links. The links caused click throughs to an Internet ad revenue site. So every time someone visits our site some hacker gets paid for the click throughs to the advertising company's sites. I was just killing time when I found they had hacked our site, AGAIN.

Last time this happened our website was listed on DNS blocking websites. Our customers could get to our site because their ISP was blocking us.

The said thing is we develop web application software. We should be able to stop this but cannot.

[Straegen]

Bots five years ago weren't such a big deal now the are a complete PIA. The big nasty exploit now is SQL injection. Most major site hacks on secured data are because of poor security management of the SQL routines.