Announcement - Spam Bots

Forum Meta
1

We are aware of the massive influx of spam bots right now.

Due to this, any new user to the Forum, and this is temporary, will not be able to post.

Thank you for your understanding.

For any new users affected:

  • If you need general support, please ask in the #support channel on our Discord server: Pretendo Network

  • If trying to submit a Ban Appeal or Hacker Report and are unable to, please bear with us until we restore posting.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

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Good because it’s annoying having to flag every spam bot i see so i don’t want more of them

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I have a question? Do you think you could consider if enough people flag 1 account a certain amount of times you could have it so that a auto System temporarily disables the account I do understand though that this could open up the possibility of people spam flagging to get a account deactivated for a time which could be bad

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I don’t think Discourse even has that as a feature to begin with.

But even then, that’s not likely something we would implement. Precisely because of the possibility of abuse.

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6

Thanks for this, spam bots are a plague on just about every public forum.

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How did they bypass the new user thingy? Like, they are still a new user, and they only joined 2 hours ago, and their post is pretty suspicious.

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I do understand why there would be a posting restriction, however, I think it’s less than ideal for the only source of support for new users (who need it the most) is a discord server. I don’t know how much of the Pretendo population uses Discord, but I’d imagine a part doesn’t.

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I personally agree but we don’t have another feasible solution. In case you’ve got a feasible solution, let us know please

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I don’t know if any of my ideas are even helpful, but you could:

  • Maybe do a captcha or something
  • Have them verify somehow on Wii U/3DS (I don’t know if you have any way to do this, though, maybe have them change their Mii from the default one)
  • Restrict the text body of new users somehow, maybe disallowing links and/or certain words
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I have been very strongly against this given that:

  • One of our admins does not have a console apparently
  • Quite a few of our users are not modded

We’ll take this into consideration though, I don’t think a captcha is going to stop them either tbh

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Now new users can post again?

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18

Yes, we have introduced measures to prevent spam. We will not go into details at this time.

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