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Botspam apocalypse

memex.marginalia.nu

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Re: Botspam apocalypse

#81

Post by varispeed »

paulmd wrote: post #2

> They're a major part in killing off web forums, and a significant wet blanket on any sort of fun internet creativity or experimentation. > The only ones that can survive the robot apocalypse is large web services. Your reddits, and facebooks, and twitters, and SaaS-comment fields, and discords. They have the economies of scale to develop viable countermeasures, to hire teams of people to work on the problem full ti…

> There are web forums that are not "web-scale" and don't spend all day fighting bot spam. The solution is real simple: it costs 10 bux to register an account, if you're a nuisance your account is banned and you pay 10bux to get back on.

There is a big problem with all sorts of activists though. Their modus operandi is finding forums they don't like and the go on post illegal material and reporting it to hosting provider. Many forums stopped accepting new users because of that and for instance only way to sign up is to find the owner and speak directly to them.

Re: Botspam apocalypse

#82

Post by closewith »

paulmd wrote: post #60
paulmd wrote: post #2

> They're a major part in killing off web forums, and a significant wet blanket on any sort of fun internet creativity or experimentation. > The only ones that can survive the robot apocalypse is large web services. Your reddits, and facebooks, and twitters, and SaaS-comment fields, and discords. They have the economies of scale to develop viable countermeasures, to hire teams of people to work on the problem full ti…

few edits I wanted to make but couldn't while HN was down: this comes to a question of intentions, right? Like are you trying to build a high-value community , or are you trying to make a billion-dollar company? Photrio or Pentaxforums is never going to sell for a billion dollars like Reddit, and that's not the kind of community that Reddit is trying to build. The highly-chaotic multithreaded model of Reddit/HN/etc i…

> The highly-chaotic multithreaded model of Reddit/HN/etc is directly designed to be impenetrable and chaotic, where everyone is just responding to everyone rather than having a "flow of conversation" in which everyone is involved.

I couldn’t disagree more with this characterisation. Part of the reason that sites like Reddit and HN are preferred to traditional fora (which have their own engagement mechanisms) is because it's possible to have a different set of discussions on a topic.

Single-threaded fora result in many conversations on various sub-topics and of varying quality being multiplexed in a single chaotic and incomprehensible comment chain. Comment trees allow sub-topics and sub-conversions to be grouped in a reasonable fashion, and voting allows junk contributions to be pushed to the bottom.

It's not just webscale entrepreneurs - users love comment trees. It's part of why sites like Reddit and HN succeeded in gaining traction, and why subreddits are now the de facto replacement for fora (unfortunately, as it centralises editorial power).

Re: Botspam apocalypse

#83

Post by G3rn0ti »

me_again wrote: post #6
x-complexity wrote: post #4

> The other alternatives all suck to the extent of my knowledge, they're either prohibitively convoluted, or web3 cryptocurrency micro-transaction nonsense that while sure it would work, also monetizes every single interaction in a way that is more dystopian than the actual skull-crushing robot apocalypse. In the interest of practicality: There's a way to go the web3 route without being laden with transactions: - Min…

That seems "prohibitively convoluted" to me, if nothing else.

This whole minting and transaction issueing is done by a single (or two) mouse clicks if you use a browser plug-in like the MetaMask wallet.

Re: Botspam apocalypse

#84

Post by golergka »

> If Marginalia Search didn't use Cloudflare, it couldn't serve traffic. There has been upwards of 15 queries per second from bots.

15 RPS is very far from an apocalypse.

Re: Botspam apocalypse

#85

Post by Tehdasi »

paulmd wrote: post #2

> They're a major part in killing off web forums, and a significant wet blanket on any sort of fun internet creativity or experimentation. > The only ones that can survive the robot apocalypse is large web services. Your reddits, and facebooks, and twitters, and SaaS-comment fields, and discords. They have the economies of scale to develop viable countermeasures, to hire teams of people to work on the problem full ti…

> And they value engagement over content quality, which is the entire reason comment-tree/vote-based systems have been pushed heavily over web-1.0 threaded forum discussions as well.

While they certainly do value engagement over quality, I suspect that the systems are put in place because they don't scale in terms of manpower, and they don't trust their users to do formalize the structure of the site.

Re: Botspam apocalypse

#86

Post by gostsamo »

paulmd wrote: post #2

> They're a major part in killing off web forums, and a significant wet blanket on any sort of fun internet creativity or experimentation. > The only ones that can survive the robot apocalypse is large web services. Your reddits, and facebooks, and twitters, and SaaS-comment fields, and discords. They have the economies of scale to develop viable countermeasures, to hire teams of people to work on the problem full ti…

A bit below the author talks how creating any form of account is going counter to their goal of free and anonymous, so they are looking only for a behavioral sift of bots.

Re: Botspam apocalypse

#88

Post by EdwardDiego »

sparkling wrote: post #47
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #31

It's not that bad. First, of course, you have cloudflare and recaptcha, which are free and very efficient, as the author say. But even if you don't want to use them (some of my services don't), most bots are very dumb: - require JS, and you lose half of the web ones - silly tricks like hidden input fields in forms that worked in 2000 still work in 2022. Use a bunch of them, and you can yet again halve the bot traffic…

Very nice list of countermeasures. I agree that doing these small things like hidden input fields really go a long way. I would add to that: - block signups/comments from known throwaway email domains - block known datacenter IP ranges, at least for POST requests. Honestly on our sites 50% of spam was coming from AWS EC2 IPs - use a proxy/vpn/bot detection service like https://focsec.com

Yup, in adtech, "IP is an AWS block" was a bot 99.999% of the time.

The 0.001% was that person using EC2 as a proxy or VPN server.

Re: Botspam apocalypse

#89

Post by mnd999 »

s1k3s wrote: post #44
kazinator wrote: post #15

In the 1980's, we kept anklebyters off dial-up BBSses with a simple technique: voice validation. To join the forum, you had to fill an application first, which included your real name and phone number. The sysop would give you a call for a quick chat, and then grant you access if you didn't seem like a twit. This would be entirely practical for some small-time operator trying to run a forum off residential broadband,…

I guess it's a different time and it also depends on who's your target audience. Some people go crazy if you ask for their email address. Phone numbers and calling is a big no-no.

Phone number is an excellent tracking identifier across services. Even better than email, which is why the data hoarders want it.

Re: Botspam apocalypse

#90

Post by luckylion »

TomK32 wrote: post #7
hamilyon2 wrote: post #5

I experienced this firsthand with government immigration websites. The thing is there are only so many time slots and and people are forsed to use a certain web site to apply, so everyone is hunting for available time and generally none are available. So, some creative people set up bots which check periodically for them. They are paid services which will do that for you. Now we have bots hammering gatekeeper's websi…

I faced a website like this recently when booking a slot at my own German embassy, went a different route around the embassy instead. What I don't like about the slot system: You won't get a convenient time slot anyways so why do they bother setting it up like this in the first place? Why not just register with your contact details and receive an email with a guaranteed spot at a selection of three days instead. No m…

That reminds me of the chaos that ensued in my state in the early days of Covid-19 vaccination when they were still having centralized systems where the elderly could book an appointment. Of course, they had way more demand than supply but still insisted on First Come, First Served, so you ended up with every member of the extended family being asked to try and book a slot, quickly overwhelming their booking systems.

At least you didn't need to worry about it all day: there wasn't a chance in hell to get something 3 minutes after the booking system opened each day.

Friends described how stressful it was for them, their parents being completely helpless and essentially fearing that their health depended on getting one of those elusive appointments, and being devastated each day they didn't succeed.

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