Pokémon Acanthite Forums

Hi all,

Some of you may be aware that, over the past month or two, we've had an alarming amount of userbots around the place. Many of you haven't even realised that they have been userbots: you've just regarded them as your run-of-the-mill newbies. Unfortunately, the number of userbots we've been getting has grown far too much for us to stand aside and just delete them one by one. We have to cut them off at the source.

Unfortunately, and the poor people at Google probably don't realise it themselves... but that source is Gmail. Nine times out of ten, a userbot will sign up with a Gmail address. As a result of this, starting on Sunday 17 January, new members will not be allowed to register using Gmail addresses. If you currently use a Gmail address, we cannot guarantee that this will not affect you, but if it does we will take steps to ensure that this is minimal.

Basically, the best thing to do is change your email address on here if you're currently using Gmail. If your Gmail account is your only account, and you don't want to get another one, cross your fingers and hope that you aren't affected when we switch off Gmail.

I feel pretty crap for not being able to do anything for the project itself and always focusing on the forums, but... you do what you're good at, I guess.

Cipher

.... oh crap. Well, at least it will get rid of fake newbies. I hope nobody is EXTREMELY affected. That would just suck.

I use gmail, what's a userbot? why can't you just get rid of userbots instead of everyone who uses gmail? and why is a userbot bad? I DONT WANT TO BE KICKED OUT, THIS SITE AND PROJECT ARE TOO INTERESTING!!!!

^Lol, don't worry mate, just make a hotmail or yahoo just for this site's emails. That way you should be secured.

I don't use Gmail so it shouldn't be too much of a big deal for me. And Ciph, don't feel bad, you've gave people warning.

Why not just ask a simple pokemon related question upon registering? I don't think userbots are that smart are they?

But do want you need to do, and thanks for the heads up Ciph.

(15-01-2010 06:35 PM)Akihide Wrote: [ -> ]Why not just ask a simple pokemon related question upon registering? I don't think userbots are that smart are they?

Who actually knows the intelligence of these userbots, anyways? They could get the questions right, and we'd have more userbots.
And if we did go with the question and made it Acanthite-related, we wouldn't get any new members (unless they actually check out the website).

The way I see it, this is a good idea to stop an impending userbot invasion. Plus, we gave people enough time to change their email addresses. So it shouldn't be an issue anymore. Well done, Cipher.

These userbots are, unfortunately, rather intelligent. They have a great deal of knowledge - so much so that some of them are as intelligent as our members themselves. We wouldn't be able to tell them just by their posts - we always need to look deeper.

Can I emphasise that any users who have a Gmail address at the present time will not necessarily be affected by this - either nobody will be affected or everyone will be. I sincerely hope it's the former. We honestly don't have a clue what's going to happen when we switch off Gmail, but it's something that we still have to do.

GoogleBot, Yahoo! Slurp, and MSNBot are all I've seen.... if those are what you mean.

(15-01-2010 10:53 PM)Decapitated Banana Wrote: [ -> ]GoogleBot, Yahoo! Slurp, and MSNBot are all I've seen.... if those are what you mean.

No, they're spiders. They check every single thread and post on the forum so they can be placed into search engines. userbots sign up with actual accounts and are actual members but are placed in by advertising companies to try and trick us into buying their crap (nearly said something a lot worse then ).

Be right back crossing my fingers and praying I'm not screwed over by this. (think I might have made a Hotmail account once, but I already forgot the password methinks, so Gmail is all I've got >_>

*walks away with fingers crossed*