Community is Moving (Again!)
May 31st, 2011, News
Since the beginning of time we’ve had problems keeping our forums clean from spam. At one point our Dawn of Daria forum had over 30,000 bot accounts, and the forums here at OxeyeGames.com have had their share of dildos and ads for online drug stores. Upgrading the spam filters doesn’t seem to help much, and we’re growing tired of it.
We discussed closing down the forums altogether since it’s easier to contact us via Twitter (@vraket, @kinten, @jeb_ and @anosou) or email anyway, but having forums is a good way of letting players get in touch with each other. So our new idea is to piggy-back on the Reddit and create an Oxeye-related community there, which hopefully will be easier to keep relevant.
In other words, please head over to http://www.reddit.com/r/OxeyeGames and subscribe to our subreddit!
June 2nd, 2011 at 9:17 am
There are simple mechanisms to prevent pretty much all bots from creating accounts.
If you’re using a default registration progress of a often used software bots will know it. Changing it a tad-bit (formfield names etc) can help already as the bots known process is broken.
Hidden form fields users can not see and you expect to be empty help a lot.
Etc.
June 2nd, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Yeah, but its not a long term solution since it assumes our forum will never be of enough interest to spammers for them to crack it specifically.
We also did the stupid thing of installing a beta version of the forums, so its impossible to upgrade without paying lots of money to someone, and trying to keep up to date with new versions and threats and all that would still be unfeasible in the long run. We considered moving to a completely new forum, but that would only solve part of the problem.
Good thing about reddit is that is has a really good system for getting relevant stuff to the top as well as handling the registration and spam-protection stuff for all communities.
We did add a custom form field to the current forum, but either its broken, or the bots managed to crack that as well. In summary, the world of spam is really hard to keep at bay by just yourself, you need to coordinate your effects for it to be robust, and us being just a really small indie studio we cannot really afford to start every morning by deleting 10 spam users.
I hope you can understand =)
/thewreck
July 2nd, 2011 at 8:48 am
Well, that sucks… all my old ideas are gone now.
I’m sure if they are good enough to use they are good enough to remember.
You still remember me, right?