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As the popularity of our website platform has increased so have the bots and over the last few years we have had a few different measures in place to prevent bots from registering accounts, then spamming members. Bot detection is a tricky area, people that use Bots to exploit registration systems to spam members or cause harm to the platform are nothing more then amateur hackers. Our goal with our original "passive Captcha (challenge-response) type system" was something you may have never been aware of. We used triggers to detect if a user was real or bot, this method also allowed us to avoid using the sometimes cryptic image Captcha systems for a long time. Unfortunately we have discovered that the bot makers have found a way around this system.
A few weeks ago we added an image Captcha system, this required people registering to enter a series of numbers and letters into box on registration page from an image with lines and static.
However this was soon bypassed as well because some bots have what is called OCR technology. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, and that allows bots to read the Captcha Code, then enter it into the registration form. In order to resolve  this new issue we had 2 choice; add more letters and number with more static and lines (Make it harder for bots and your members to register) or develop a brand new, never seen before Captcha Method that would really keep the bots at bay. To give you an idea of the problem, we track bot attempts and have an algorithm we developed to see if an account is a bot or not after the fact. This allows us to judge the problem and shift resource if/when needed to further combat the issue. In the last 7 day period over 10,000 attempts were made by Bots to register accounts on websites in our network, out of that number about 1500 accounts were registered and on Spruz.com about 400 websites were created as a direct result of bot registrations.
Today I am happy to announce we have in place a new Captcha System that we been developing in order to deploy a system that was easy to use for the user registering but impossible for Bots with newer and more advanced OCR technology to figure out.
This system works by displaying an image generated on the fly with 3 randomly placed picture icons placed within the image, then indicating to the member what images they must click on and in what order. Thus instead of your member having to read a cryptic message then type it out, they pick/click 2 of the icons in the order we set to verify they a real person and not a bot. Since deployment yesterday we have seen 0 registrations out of 1,500 bot registration attempt in the last 24 hours.
Keeping your personal, business, or group website/network secure and spam free is a very important part of why you use the Spruz Website Platform for your social space.
Like anything new, there is room for improvement, bugs that may popup, etc. Please report problems in a support ticket to us, this allows us to personally address your issue with you, and more then likely fixes a problem for many others that have not experienced the problem you are reporting yet.
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