What's with all the adbots?

[Kelleo]

I swear that I see at least one or two show up on the forum every day and it's kind of irritating. Doesn't Bulbagarden have some kind of test thing that someone has to go through when making an account? You know, like those things where you have to type in what you see in the box? Those are supposed to make sure that the person registering is an actual person.

If the staff are looking for a way to stop the adbots, then my apologies for the complaint.

 

[Kogoro]

@Kelleo; Bulbagarden already uses spam prevention technology at the user signup phase, which stops hundreds of attempted spam account creations every single day. However, no spam prevention method has a perfect 100% prevention rate, so some accounts manage to sometimes get through (Something under 1% of any given day's attempted spam account creations). Such accounts are banned as quickly a humanly possible, when the staff have noticed, or been alerted to via the report system, the account's undesirable activity.

There's also a point where attempting to prevent spam account creations results in preventing legitimate users from being able to sign up, and we definitely don't want to hinder our members from enjoying Bulbagarden simply to make our jobs that extremely tiny bit easier.

 

[Hector]

Pretty much what Kogoro said. I won't bore you all with the technical explanation of the whole thing (how CAPTCHA is easily beaten by computers and how even reCAPTCHA, which was the enhanced version that was designed to be easier on humans but impossible for computers was... well beaten by computers), but basically no spam prevention system works 100% of the time. Because otherwise spammers would be out of a job.

We do what we can (both on the technical side but also on the moderation side when bots do get through), but there's a limit really. Bulbagarden is a really popular site (the bulba domain hovers around a top 1000 alexa ranking in the USA and top 3500 globally, which is actually a big deal XD) which makes it a very attractive target for spambots.

TL;DR - spam prevention isn't perfect on the hardware level, Bulbagarden is an extremely popular site and thus an attractive target for spammers, and thus some get through. More than we'd like, but we do what we can.

 

[Kelleo]

@Kogoro; @Yang Xiao Long; Ah, I understand. I hadn't known that those Captcha things weren't 100% effective. I guess I should've figured that though. I'm glad to know that you guys do what you can though and went out of your way to explain all this to me. Thanks. And yeah, you definitely don't want to make it hard for actual members to join the site.