Dandello wrote on Aug 12^th, 2012 at 11:31pm:

that or a spam botnet is down lol

Dandello wrote on Aug 13^th, 2012 at 12:31am:

Lol. 

On the subject of a random pic, if we're on the same page here, I use something similar on segnette.com forum registration. A photo at the top that has to be identified, although it doesn't change.

Between that and Spam Fruits, bam! Stopped darn near cold! 

Merv and anti-spam mod writers - 1
Spamtards - 0 

Dandello wrote on Aug 13^th, 2012 at 8:52pm:

As I understand it, our forums can easily be found by spam-bot automation no matter what directory is being used because they simply search for the YaBB.pl file that almost all of us use.

But no worries. After all, those of you in this discussion already know that installing anti-spam mods specifically designed for YaBB can easily defeat spam-bots.

"Seeeee"?  LOL

xnoddyx wrote on Aug 14^th, 2012 at 3:25am:


Google.

And after moving the testbed to yabb2/  I've got lots of spam-bot hits (all blocked from the get-go.  )  (And none on my non yabb2/ installs.)

The honeypot experts seem to think that the bots will learn to skip certain fields if they're always blocked there. But if that were true, then wouldn't the bots figure out that they're blocked at other anti-spam measures too? Just thinkin' aloud here.

112 spam-bots blocked since I installed the honeypot ( Aug 13th, 2012 at 2:23pm) - this is on a forum with no other anti-spambot mods active. (The forum does have anti-spam-post mods active.)

Note that the test forum has no Google presence, and only 2 incoming links.

The forum that used to be at that address was on their list - but that's moved and I didn't tell Google. (You can do that, ya know.) So it keeps trying.

But the Google issues points out an interesting problem/bug - messages that are missing because they were removed don't throw a 404 error on the server level. So Google never realizes that the files are missing and so keeps trying to find them.

This is from my server error log:

[Sun Aug 19 12:57:47 2012] [error] [client ] File does not exist: /testbed/500.shtml, referer: http://testbed.dandello.net/cgi-bin/yabb2/AdminIndex.pl?action=setup_guardian
[Sun Aug 19 12:57:47 2012] [alert] [client ] /testbed/cgi-bin/yabb2/.htaccess: deny requires at least two arguments, 'from' followed by hostnames or IP-address wildcards, referer: http://testbed.dandello.net/cgi-bin/yabb2/AdminIndex.pl?action=setup_guardian
[Sun Aug 19 12:40:23 2012] [error] [client 208.115.113.88] script not found or unable to stat: /testbed/cgi-bin/yabbshado
[Sun Aug 19 12:40:22 2012] [error] [client 208.115.113.88] script not found or unable to stat: /testbed/cgi-bin/yabbshado
[Sun Aug 19 12:17:32 2012] [error] [client 62.31.203.252] File does not exist: /testbed/favicon.ico
[Sun Aug 19 11:28:53 2012] [error] [client 79.186.1.143] script '/wp-login.php' not found or unable to stat 

now Yabbshado was removed - it was a test and is genuinely gone and the client IP does belong to a search engine.

favicon.ico doesn't exist

and client 79.186.1.143 is probably a badbot because it's trying to access a path that has never existed for that domain and a file that doesn't exist anyway (at least not in the public root).

Now in the YaBB error log, there are dozens of 'The information you are trying to access is not available to you. ./Messages/1329839152.txt' every day.

These messages are not there. but the search engine can't be told it's missing because the error message is the wrong one.

Granted - not too many regular forum admins just rename their old forum directory and put a new one under the old name but as a future tweak - a way of throwing a proper 404 error  when message files/ attachments/ etc. are genuinely gone.

(And the first two errors above were due to an experiment with Guardian. That's what testbeds are for.)

xnoddyx wrote on Aug 19^th, 2012 at 4:30pm:

This is one of the interesting things about Google that a lot of people don't know; that despite what webmasters try to do, and this is a good thing, Google is generally very good at identifying relevant links.

In Dandello's case, she's doing her part to fight spam-bots, so Google will look at her anti-spam attempts very kindly, and rightly so. As such, when people using YaBB want to fight spam, her site will comes up to help them.

Dandello's test bed, for instance, comes up in 4th & 5th 2nd place (under Google's ad) while using the search terms "spam-bots yaBB" (this forum comes up first, and Carsten's forum comes up second third). And again, this is what makes Google such a great search engine.

Think about it. If you use YaBB, and you're searching for help to stop spam-bots, then coming to this forum or going over to Dandello's test bed is exactly where you want to go. This is very relevant, and Google rewards relevant links.

As I've previously pointed out, Google is amazingly fast at linking relevant sites. It's not uncommon for those links to appear within seconds of any given publication.

Regarding spammers, the latest good news about Google is that they've taken steps to eliminate or make less relevant the search results for sites that are operated by spammers. It's a really good move on their part.