03-31-2023, 03:00 AM
I don't think it's as much of a issue of spotting bots as it's barring them from registering.
They tend to follow patterns, like the latest ones: Few minutes after registering they post something vaguely related to a thread, usually an inactive one. They're not the kind of active bots which keep posting after the initial spammy one, and they all have discrete spam links in their signatures instead of placing it on the body of the post. Less conspicuous than the average bot but not that much.
We're not big enough spammers would find it worth employing actual humans to analyse and work around bot restrictions. Probably a captcha upon registering is enough to block them. A custom captcha of the "write the name of the objects in this image" kind using a random pick out of 5 images not found anywhere on the internet is probably even better, as automated networks may have invested into breaking widely used captchas but would be near powerless against something unexpected without using humans, which I don't think they'd.
They tend to follow patterns, like the latest ones: Few minutes after registering they post something vaguely related to a thread, usually an inactive one. They're not the kind of active bots which keep posting after the initial spammy one, and they all have discrete spam links in their signatures instead of placing it on the body of the post. Less conspicuous than the average bot but not that much.
We're not big enough spammers would find it worth employing actual humans to analyse and work around bot restrictions. Probably a captcha upon registering is enough to block them. A custom captcha of the "write the name of the objects in this image" kind using a random pick out of 5 images not found anywhere on the internet is probably even better, as automated networks may have invested into breaking widely used captchas but would be near powerless against something unexpected without using humans, which I don't think they'd.