Bots

[Shadow]

Apologies about all the bots recently. We've added a question that should be pretty difficult for bots to the registration page, and hopefully this will shut them down for the moment. As far as I know, no bots have been able to sign up since that time, whereas we were getting several new ones per day before. They may beat it at some point, and we'll deal with that then.

However, a lot of bots sign up without posting immediately, so expect that there will still be a fair few bot posts from ones which signed before the addition of the question. I've been going through recent signups and banning the obvious ones, but there will still be a few for a while before they peter out.

If you see an obvious bot post please pm me a link to the bot's profile. It makes my job a little bit easier. Signs include

- a profile with 0 posts, but a link in their personal text or signature which is unrelated to the game
- names which are apparently random strings of letters
- personal text which isn't english (there was a few days where all the new bot signups had arabic script in their signatures)

If you really are feeling ambitious about helping out, go to the memberlist, sort by recent signup date, and send me the obvious ones. It's what I've been doing as I can, but time is limited for me at the moment.

Don't click any links they put up. While most are harmless attempts to optimize someone's pagerank, some of them are going to contain malware.

Thanks for your patience!

[Death]

And dog porn. The question trick works great as long as it's set up properly though. We had to use that over at Valhall and it worked fine even though the forum software used there was outdated the better part of a decade ago.

[Shadow]

What popular children's book series by Brian Jacques is this website theme based on? (Hint: it's the first word in the name of the game)

Should be reasonably unparseable for most bots, and it's not a common question format so there won't be any builtins that cover it. The really clever bots might take the first word hint and try various words in the question itself. We'll see. Maybe I'm overthinking it.