Scioly.org

Mods, would you consider incorporating something similar to reCaptcha questions during registration for forums? This is to prevent bots from registering. Most are harmless but I've noticed some are not appropriate(well not pg-13 if you know what I mean) and there are people on this site that are in 6th and 7th grade. For example Quizbowl's forums has something like, "type the sponsor of this site backwards".

I agree with you. However, it appears that some of the bots are necessary to edit the wiki, and are developed by Scioly. You can see Google Bot, Pi Bot, Bing Bot, etc. when you go to the active users section on the forums page.

D39IJ11 wrote: ↑April 2nd, 2023, 10:07 pm I agree with you. However, it appears that some of the bots are necessary to edit the wiki, and are developed by Scioly. You can see Google Bot, Pi Bot, Bing Bot, etc. when you go to the active users section on the forums page.

iirc the bots for Google, Bing, etc are webcrawlers that update Scioly.org's listings on their respective search engines! Scioly.org recognizes them as allowed bots and treats them appropriately. Pi-bot is a custom bot developed by pepperonipi for Scioly.org purposes (mostly wiki edits and Discord moderation at the moment, though it used to post in the forums too), and the site recognizes that as well. All these bots need approval however, while the spambots are making user-type accounts so they can open spam topics/wiki pages right away.

pumptato-cat wrote: ↑January 28th, 2023, 8:28 pm For example Quizbowl's forums has something like, "type the sponsor of this site backwards".

I know when I first signed up there was a question like that, but now there's some sort of background reCAPTCHA plugin on the Register page. Now the question is how do the bots know how to get past that?

LittleMissNyan wrote: ↑April 4th, 2023, 8:39 am I know when I first signed up there was a question like that, but now there's some sort of background reCAPTCHA plugin on the Register page. Now the question is how do the bots know how to get past that?

Or maybe they aren't full bots - what if some registered for the account, then started botting it?
Or they're just trolling

There's a Tom Scott video about this somewhere

But hey- at least they can't make their first few posts on the forums without moderator approval

pumptato-cat wrote: ↑January 28th, 2023, 8:28 pm Mods, would you consider incorporating something similar to reCaptcha questions during registration for forums? This is to prevent bots from registering. Most are harmless but I've noticed some are not appropriate(well not pg-13 if you know what I mean) and there are people on this site that are in 6th and 7th grade. For example Quizbowl's forums has something like, "type the sponsor of this site backwards".

We did implement reCAPTCHA several years ago but it appears to be sporadic in requiring the questionnaire. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. I will look into this.