The Community Admin Show #018
The Community Admin Show #018 (MP3 - 5.86MB - 17min 05sec)
Show Notes
- 0:00:11: Welcome.
- 0:01:33: Five things that we can learn from Dr. Gregory House.
- 0:07:29: Little trick for discouraging human spam (thanks Keith McLaughlin).
- 0:08:23: How I’ve been dealing with robotic spam (The Humanizer, Advanced Visual Confirmation, Anti Bot Question Hack and Spam Guardian).
- 0:12:28: Amazon.com’s two new offerings for affiliates: aStore and Omakase Links.
- 0:15:50: Farewell.
Questions, Feedback, etc.
I want to answer questions from listeners on the show. If you have a question or even if you have a general subject you’d like me to talk about, please let me know by e-mailing me. You can even remain anonymous, if you want. Just be sure to tell me.
Listener Spotlight
If you manage at least one generally family friendly community with at least 10,000 posts and you have headphones, a mic, Skype and high speed, please e-mail me. You only need to e-mail once because I add any possible guests into a pool indefinitely. Just because you e-mail doesn’t mean you’ll be brought on, but I appreciate you putting your name into the hat and I look forward to speaking with you.
Thank you for listening.
November 18th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
So Patrick, it has been 10 weeks since this show and I would like to know if your hacks worked.
November 18th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
Thanks for the comment.
They are working excellently. I’m very happy with them. :)
November 25th, 2006 at 10:40 am
[…] 0:08:37: Re-visiting of bot protection methods mentioned in episode #18. Brought up by RedMatrix. phpBB hacks mentioned: The Humanizer, Advanced Visual Confirmation and Visual Confirmation on New Posters. […]
December 21st, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Hello Patrick.
I know you generally speak of, and support the phpbb script since you run it. Your hacks are specific to that script, but introduce the concept so that we may all benefit.
I just wanted to let the vbulletin script runners that there are other vb based mods for dealing with robotic spam; and I have found a gold mine!
It is called “No-Spam!” and it allows the admin to write their own checkpoint question. They can be easy as in: “Please write ‘nospam’ in this box,” or as difficult as “If you are 15 yrs old, and your dad is one year less than thrice your age, how old are you?” (-:
Since each admin can write a plethora of questions, no one single robot can ‘memorize’ them all and would need human intervention.
Whenever you revisit this topic, please include this No-Spam! hack found on vbulletin.org. Thanks!
December 22nd, 2006 at 12:23 am
Thanks for the comment. Yes, that is what I hope to do (i.e. even though I may mention phpBB, the concepts can apply to all/most community software). I don’t know that I will mention it, but thanks for the link.