Spambots

[Jen]

Is there a way to get rid of them or ban them altogether (like IP banning if they have one o_O)?

I know this forum's not particularly active (^_^;; ), but the presence of spambots does worry me. It'd suck if people got suckered into buying products or whatever.

I'm glad they're not pornbots though. I remember when pornbots were appearing on SMnet. They never posted, but used website links in user profiles to try to get people to visit. >_< They probably had some success in getting visitors that way. >_<

[Diamond]

I'm looking into it. Maybe, If I can't figure anything out, DP can tell us how he got rid of the pornbots. >.<

[MJ-san]

The other HH's forum has also been getting spambot registrations, but so far none of them has been able to post anything. There is a way to prevent bots from accessing a site by editing the robots.txt file, but I would need to know what server they are operating from.

If you were to be the victim of such a problem robot, or simply wanted to disable robots from including a portion of your site in there search engine, you can create a text file called robots.txt and place it in the root of your website (like http://yoursite.com/robots.txt). Within that you can block a specific robot or a specific location. An example makes this easy to understand:

# robots.txt for http://yoursite.com/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /privatejournal
Disallow: /temp

User-agent: Teoma
Disallow: /

This robots.txt would disallow any robots from indexing any files in http://yoursite.com/privatejournal and http://yoursite.com/temp and disallow Ask Jeeves from indexing the site at all.

More info on bots - http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html

Database of web robots - http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/active.html

You should be able to find out from ARINS who's operating the bot.

[Jen]

This is interesting, MJ! Hopefully Diamond will be able to use this to nuke those bots. >_<

[Diamond]

I think I may have come up with a permanent solution to the spambot problem. From now on, new users will have to verify their email address before they can post.

[Jen]

Woot! ^_^