Sick of playing whack-a-mole with bots!

[lexi]

Not sure what to do. Any ideas?
This site uses phpBB.

ah found this thread, I did report a message in another forum thread. I haven't checked but does phpbb provide a captcha to register. I have seen that on other forums. Will check what is available as my background is in IT and Cyber security.

[LeoNigro]

I have switched the site to Cloudflare, and I have noticed a drop off in bots.
Any advice though would be appreciated.
I put in a lot of challenge questions that the bots seem to blow through.

[lexi]

Leo, so depending on the version of phpBB you could install hcaptcha. https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/extension/hcaptcha/

It does require an account creating for the integration to get it working but hcaptcha has a free tier which should work https://www.hcaptcha.com/pricing

Looking around there are companies that offer services to solve captchas, but as its paid I wouldnt imagine this site would be targetted. Also it wont stop human created accounts, but at least it should lower the spam even further. Great idea putting this behind Cloudflare protection btw

[eric79x]

surprised to see the bot activity. I just now created account, and had to try the captcha like 6 times before I could read the letters.

I did notice I was able to login right away, without having to click a link in a confirmation email.

side note: the irony is real - viewtopic.php?t=1727

[Geogere]

surprised to see the bot activity. I just now created account, and had to try the captcha like 6 times before I could read the letters.sex dolls cheap

I did notice I was able to login right away, without having to click a link in a confirmation email.

side note: the irony is real - viewtopic.php?t=1727

I agree with you, it took me a few minutes to sign up as well, probably because I'm getting old and I entered the captcha maybe 5-6 times. But it turned out to be lucky that I could come in to this friendly forum. Let's boycott bots together!

[LeoNigro]

Cloudflare really sucks!!!
I checked the phpBB forums and they gave Cloudflare high marks.
Whilst the bots seems to have died down it often logs you out when you post.
I'm so close to removing it, it is soooo annoying.

Maybe I can remove the caching entirely, but that kind of defeats the purpose.

Are you guys having problems too?

I even had to post this twice. Be sure to copy your post to the clipboard before submitting.

[LeoNigro]

You may have noticed that the site has been down for a few days, with a SQL connection max error.

I figured Cloudflare may be the problem and have since removed Cloudflare, and it would appear everything has finally reset and the site is fully functional once more, without the glitches I mentioned.

But, now the bots are back with a vengeance. So if you see them, bear with me as I'll get around to deleting and banning the bot users in short order.

I'll keep monitoring the situation.
In a couple of weeks I might rejoin Cloudflare to handle the bot situation, but this time I'll ensure nothing is cached, which may have been the cause of the issue.
A forum is an app with dynamic content after all, and you can't really expect to cache something like that, so I should have listened to my intuition.

[LeoNigro]

Well, the SQL connection error is coming back intermittently, so it wasn't Cloudflare's fault after all, although the site did act weird with it.
I think I'll switch back to Cloudflare tomorrow, but turn off the page caching as far as I can.
I'm wasting at least 30 mins a during the day dealing with the bots.