And basing things on mouse movements has another wrinkle: Not everyone uses a mouse and how do you distinguish the actions of a spambot from those of a screen reader or other assistive technology users use to get around bad web design?
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Pardon the guy living under a rock here: why are people creating bots to randomly sign up to forums?
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There are several reasons, but one is precisely to test the effectiveness of the bot. Automated scripts are commissioned for all kinds of purposes. Deployment on an environment unrelated to its true purpose allows to test it in a low-risk fashion.
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Pardon the guy living under a rock here: why are people creating bots to randomly sign up to forums?
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Sometimes they don’t even need to directly spam the users of a particular site. Some people are trying to get their website and keywords crawled by Google in as many places online as they can so it will appear in searches. In very simple terms, Google goes “wow, this URL appears on a lot of pages that mention games, so perhaps this website is something people searching for games want to see…”
This kind of thing can be done in good faith on forums that allow automatic signatures - you put the link to your game or website in the signature, and then participate legitimately so your link appears in multiple places on the website and has a good chance of someone clicking on it. When not done it good faith, it’s akin to that person at the party who barges into any conversation group that is discussing food to promote their commercial recipe blog without really caring what the actual conversation is about. Spammers are just automating this process.
This is why a level-0 new user has limits on how many links they can post right off the bat, and links in their profile I believe are disabled until they spend time and participate here.
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We could do something crazy like move the whole thing to a MUD. I don’t think IFMUD’s having any spam issues. Then again, that makes the discussions non-crawl-able for search engines though, and basically makes the community go effectively dark as far as the rest of the internet is concerned, so there are significant consequences to a strategy like that.
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Obviously I don’t know what things look like from the mod side, but unless we’re getting an uncontrollable amount of bot traffic, the current manual approval system seems to work fine. I think moving to a MUD might be too drastic, though.
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Okay, to my ears, “MUD” means “multi-user dungeon”, Which I understand to be the common parlance for old school dungeon crawl games in the style of Rogue, but strictly multi-player, sort of the oldschool precursor of the MMORPG.
I’m not familiar with that genre, so I might be missing something, but since moving a forum into a game doesn’t make much sense, I’m going to assume yall are using a very different sense of MUD.
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Yes, a MUD isn’t something people usually think of as a venue for spam and it’s a little more complicated. There are some web clients, but usually a MUD client has to be downloaded and set up and connects to a live server hosting a game similar to a MMORPG. The barrier to entry is higher and the audience is generally way smaller than a website.
IFMUD is its own cool thing, but as Pinkunz seems aware, I seriously don’t think that it would be practical to move the forums inside a MUD.
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Goodness, I think I’m counting myself as lucky that my sign up was approved, then! My user name is meaningful to me, but I happen to know that it looks like gobbledygook to many folks. 
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“Daeghrafen” actually looks deliberate. The names we’re rejecting are like “llklkjlkjjlkj” that were obviously keyboard mashed with one hand.
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Fair enough! It did make me laugh, though, just because I’ve been asked so many times what on earth it means or how to pronounce it (since I also use it for email and various other accounts).
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I can’t at all imagine what you mean!
Signed,
Hanon Ondricek
Jacq actually had to PM me to ask how to pronounce my name for the IFComp livestream. I missed her message, so I feel bad, but she managed it.
I honestly rarely say it out loud. I assume it rhymes with “cannon laundry-check”.
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Hah!!
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/me passing the sponge to Hanon 
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio
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