Increase of bots in recent years?

[G-Dizzle]

 

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In 2019, new posts started declining while new members was increasing. Now in 2024, we have a new member for approximately every 1.8 posts. I would assume most of these are bots of some sort. Data gathering or otherwise.

Just was wondering if anyone else has noticed this trend and what, if anything, could or should be done about it.

[Farmer X]

I've never really noticed it. But the moderators and admins do a pretty good job of giving spambots the boot. Presumably it's harder to get rid of the data mining sort. I'd think having new registrants answer a simple question as part of the process may help, but I suspect the louts who program those bots may have developed a work-around. Maybe Whoey could give a better answer?

[Grand_Banana]

A verify test might be a good check.  Earlier today I had to verify I am human on a webpage… so far I haven’t failed that test.  I’m not so good at selecting which images have stop lights. 

The drastic increase in membership numbers is crazy. 

[SteveC]

I'll move this to the Q&A section.

[Poncho65]

Since Covid we have had an increase in members but they post less Myself and and a couple others don't post as much these days either we also had some prolific posters in those days that don't really even visit the forum these days Social Media is also a force that keeps members there (posting) and not here as well

That's my take on it anyways

We also have a filter that keeps a lot of bots (fake members) out that we (the Mods) can either approve or reject (we mostly always reject)  this is a multiple times a day job as well

[SteveC]

I may be wrong but I think that a lot of the new members shown on that list are ones
 that are  rejected by us.

[Poncho65]

That may very well be the case but I thought the Forum only kept up with actual members that were still signed up

[SteveC]

That may very well be the case but I thought the Forum only kept up with actual members that were still signed up

Maybe Whoey can clarify.

It seems odd that the membership would triple in one year but all other stats would be lower than previous years.

[Whoey]

We seem to be getting hit a lot harder recently vs previous years, I would say what we use to get in spambots before each month we are now getting weekly if not daily.

posts don't get too elevated by them as most are banned before they can post, or not long afterwards.

When I have a bit more time to look maybe I can shed more light on it, but first, christmas shopping to be done...

[Whoey]

Fun fact, the bot filter has blocked over 1.3 million bot signup attempts since we installed it.

Not including anything that slipped by and was handled by the moderators.

[SteveC]

Whoey, are these new member numbers accurate or are they inflated by new spam members that are then rejected by us or the bot filter ?



 

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[Poncho65]

I was only looking at the member list at the bottom and not looking at that list :oI retract my previosu statement at least in that list

[Whoey]

it looks like that is including members that are deleted, in spite me purging a bunch of 0 post users (inactive > 90 days) and recounting stats, we now haw over 30k new users this year, I would say the majority are not actual users.

looks like we need to add more stringent filtering for bans.