Spam Research: Experiment Continued on SMF Forum

A continuation of the Spambot Experiment with an SMF forum, read about the first experiment here: https://zylblog.com/2011/12/spambot-experiment/

The forums were completely wiped out on the 24th of December (all registered members were deleted, all posts removed, etc). A few options were changed: Guest posting was enabled. Registration verification was disabled. User threshold was decreased to 1 minute for accurate bot timekeeping.

Just a heads up: the next experiment is what I expect to yield more results. I plan on disabling Cloudflare, my preliminary blocking agent (blocks at the DNS level. Everything recorded up to this point is research that had that preliminary block on, blocking the most prominent and oldest bots.

The total view: 161307 Posts in 130008 Topics by 132563 Members on 3/11/2012.

Interestingly, now that I’ve set the threshold for user time online so that one single action counts for at most one minute, there are still bots that register abnormally high times online:

I have a hard time imagining how these numbers are even possible, it seems like a major waste of resources to allow a bot to stay on any given site for so long. It seems to me that the most a bot should do is go to the site, register (if necessary), post the spam, and move on to the next site to cover as much as possible.

Likewise, many topics have an abnormal view count (probably only from a single bot replying to its own topics multiple times).

Top ten topics by replies and views:

Top ten posters and topic starters are identical:

Summary statistics:

Average registrations per day:

783.35

Average posts per day:

1070.14

Average topics per day:

890.99

Average online per day:

26.75

Male to Female Ratio:

20167:1

Average page views per day:

19620.24

Conclusion: Interesting.

Next, Cloudflare’s anti-spam technology is going to be disabled completely.