Author Topic: Spam Bots  (Read 410 times)

Martin Iturbide

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Spam Bots
« on: November 01, 2025, 03:56:34 am »
Hello

I'm trying some available tools to try to slow down the bots spamming the site.
Please let me know any strange behavior that you may find on the site.

Regards
Martin Iturbide
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Andi B.

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Re: Spam Bots
« Reply #1 on: November 01, 2025, 10:44:37 am »
Joulian installed on the hostap/wpa_supplicant site something called Anubis. No clue what it is or does though. But he said traffic load goes down by more than 99% cause all of these bots are now blocked before they load the server.

fusion

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Re: Spam Bots
« Reply #2 on: November 05, 2025, 08:18:00 am »
anubis is a proxy that forces a web browser to do a tiny bit of "work" a scripted bot would generally be incapable of. if they succeed then the connection is passed along to the real web server.

it would be wise to confirm that the web browsers we do have on os/2 are capable of passing the checks  ;)

Dave Yeo

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Re: Spam Bots
« Reply #3 on: November 05, 2025, 08:59:26 am »
Well I went to their website, https://anubis.techaro.lol/ and it claimed to be testing the soul of my browser and I seemed to have passed as after a second or two the page loaded. This is with No-Script so no JavaScript was run.
Edit: This is SeaMonkey. Turning JS on (only one domain) did make the site work better and it works fine on our browsers, at least at a quick look.
« Last Edit: November 05, 2025, 09:03:38 am by Dave Yeo »

Andi B.

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Re: Spam Bots
« Reply #4 on: November 05, 2025, 10:20:36 am »
That's the site I'm talking about https://w1.fi/ (most probably).

Sorry I wrote Jouni Malinen's name wrong above. He wrote about spam bots and Anubis in the news group. As I don't have any knowledge about bots and protection I can't say anything about different approaches or software.

Martin Iturbide

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Re: Spam Bots
« Reply #5 on: November 05, 2025, 03:50:14 pm »
Hello

Thanks for the feedback.

Anubis looks interesting, and I tried out the Anubis site on ArcaOS's Firefox, Dooble and Otter.
All three browsers access the "checking you are not a bot page" and access the site fine. Firefox has an exception that didn't support the graphics, but went also to the page. I think it will work for our browsers.

But, a few days ago I had installed BadBot Protection for Joomla, (which also seems to work on our browsers) and I think it is similar, it also shows sometimes a "checking you are not a bot page" on OS2World and for the moment I haven't have issues. But let's see what happens.

Regards
Martin Iturbide
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Dave Yeo

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Re: Spam Bots
« Reply #6 on: November 05, 2025, 04:45:51 pm »
The images don't display in FF/SM due to being webp which our browsers are too old to support.

David Graser

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Re: Spam Bots
« Reply #7 on: November 05, 2025, 09:25:45 pm »
I noticed when the problem happens, the Latest Forum posts is the last to come up.  I wonder if the downloads are using most of your bandwidth.  There are a couple of themes showing thousands of downloads while others show over 500 downloads. When I tried a download test during one of the problem times, it was so slow, one would think I was using an old modem.

Don’t get me wrong. I like posting the themes here because people have some idea what they are downloading due to the pictures showing the themes.
« Last Edit: November 05, 2025, 09:36:48 pm by David Graser »

Dave Yeo

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Re: Spam Bots
« Reply #8 on: November 05, 2025, 11:46:54 pm »
Sounds like bots are downloading the themes, can't imagine enough users for that many downloads

David Graser

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Re: Spam Bots
« Reply #9 on: Today at 12:04:05 am »
I was thinking the same thing.