Non humans on this website
 

I loved the bit about using google something or other to verify I'm human in the new privacy conditions. The mental image of aliens sitting up there in spacecraft going 'darn it they're onto us!' was priceless. ;D

Re: Non humans on this website
 

Last time I had to go through one of those Recaptcha things to prove I was a human, it took some convincing, so I do wonder at times. Actually, I reckon I'm human - it's just that I live in an alien world. :)

Re: Non humans on this website
 

If you click on who's online, you'll see non-Humans reading posts. The "spiders" or "crawlers" from the search engines wander about. That's how we often come top of internet searches.

Re: Non humans on this website
 

Actually if we don't have something like that we get a lot more automated spammer sign-ups every day.

For the most part it does work, and the new one is easier for humans than the old one with two words or a number or whatever.

Re: Non humans on this website
 

Yes, the search engines recognise this as a site with regularly changing and increasing content, so spider it constantly. They only see what guests (not logged in) can see.

Often new threads will be indexed and in search results within minutes.

Re: Non humans on this website
 

For information those of us using Palemoon browser have incredible issues with those Google captchas, having to go through multiple screens of spot the cars until it lets us in. It seems Google has a thing about minority browsers and I suspect those using Chrome get in first click.

Fortunately being long time registered here I don't have that problem with this forum.

Dave

Re: Non humans on this website
 

Yep. no problems with Chrome. It's fine with Firefox, Opera, IE and Edge too.

Web developers test on the browsers used by the majority of people, and with those five plus Safari on Apple devices, that's something like 99.8% of users covered. It is not worth the time or money to test and fix on loads of tiny minority browsers for the last 0.2%. The onus should be on the minority browser publishers to make sure their browsers are compatible with sites and systems that work on the main ones.

Re: Non humans on this website
 

The non humans bring in new members if they use Google photos and then click on a thumbnail of one of our photos.
The forum software will request them to join if they want to add to the thread the photo is in.

Re: Non humans on this website
 

What are you all going on about?

Re: Non humans on this website
 

Perhaps a slight downside to that is that if I see an interesting question on here and Google it to help find an answer it is likely that the first search result is the thread asking the question.

Recursion: see recursion.

Re: Non humans on this website
 

I had a feeling I might be human.

Alan

Re: Non humans on this website
 

Ha Ha my thought was how could you tell.

Cheers

Mike T

Re: Non humans on this website
 

I'm human. Don't believe what other people say, it's just malicious gossip. It'll stop when I remember where I put my Kil-O-Zap disintegrator...

David

Re: Non humans on this website
 

We are talking about how the forum software stops hackers using robots opening thousands of new member accounts to **** us off while still letting new members find us.

Re: Non humans on this website
 

I'm human - and I can sing you a song to prove it:

"Dai-sy, Dai-sy ............... give me your answer .......... do ........ "
"I'm half ..... cra-zy ....... all for the love of ........................ you .........."

Re: Non humans on this website
 

It's relatively easy to write some software to open an account on an unprotected chat groups using common versions of chat software. So such things are routinely distributed on botnets so that a few of them can send out spam-style adverts wrapped up as postings on that group.

If you look on less well-protected groups, periodically down all their threads you'll see completely irrelevant posts advertising the usual spam fare. They must think they're still making enough money out of it to still bother. Haven't people worked out that the products are as fake as the adverts?

Paul and the mods will see reports of the numbers of attempts on this website that are automatically foiled, and they will know of the numbers they had to manually turf off. The rest of us don't see this, but I suspect the numbers could come as a surprise.

David

Re: Non humans on this website
 

Thanks for that. :)

Re: Non humans on this website
 

We still get plenty of spammers registering manually of course, but their posts require mod approval and are never approved so never become visible. We have to delete the posts and ban the spammers.

Re: Non humans on this website
 

The effort is appreciated.

Members will have noticed that if they submit a photo of something rare, it very often goes straight to the top of google images. My other half was perplexed to notice her favourite duvet cover was a background for a couple of these images..

Re: Non humans on this website
 

And all without the assistance of any SEO (search engine optimisation) companies or tricks! Google and the other main search engines are smart enough to recognise well maintained regularly updated websites of good (and fairly uncommon) information, and index them accordingly. By "well maintained" I mean lack of spam, copy/pasted content, inappropriate language and other rubbish.

Having a commonly used forum system probably helps too, as Google etc would understand the URL format and site structure etc.

Of course this is probably why the spammers want a piece of the action too, but we won't let them!