I just "broke" the penisbot captcha... Further to the Captcha discussion...
 

...in this thread...
http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/...ad.php?t=45164

I'm not trying to be a prick or anything, just trying to educate when it comes to trying to stop the cheaters/auto submitters, which, IMO, can't really be done via the submit form without driving away real quality submitters.

I'm by no means "brilliant" and I don't have any OCR type code.. but a light bulb went off in my head today and I sat down and spent maybe an hour and a half to "prove" my theory... And it works... So far 100% accurate... If anyone is interested I can put a page up that shows it broken... using the techinque I came up with can break a lot of the captcha used on the link lists I've seen including richards-realm, hoes, obviously wetplace, freesitexxx, sexties, smutlinks etc.

A quality submitter wouldn't be driven away by a captcha form.

I think the whole issue is blown way out of proportion. You can spend hours on end whining about it and trying to break people's forms just to prove a point, or just type in the damn code (5 seconds) and be done with it. IMHO.

I agree |loony|
Your hacking could possible make the captcha problem worse and probable get you black listed

I think you're biased by this forum... Do you submit freesites to say 50 LLs a day? If you did you'd soon realize that it's not cost effective to do it by hand... I'm shocked by the low amount of traffic that gets sent to the free sites...

But then again, if you're only doing this as a hobbby as opposed to running it like a business, then I guess it wouldn't matter.

I always find it interesting how the LL owners tell the subimtters to stop whining... Why not just close down your form and build all your own free sites if you hold the submitters in such disdain.

Thanks for taking the time to pull your head out of your hole in the sand and add something of value to the discussion...

I'm probably one of the more prolific freesite submitters on this board with about 800 sites under my belt and my submit list has at times included as many as 144 LLs.

Where did you come up with the idea that I hold submitters in disdain? I hold crybabies in disdain.

|popcorn| |duff|

Ya know, I don't really give a shit if I attract the "quality submitters" who submit to 50 LL's a day, If I miss a FS that every other LL has that's cool with me.
I'd rather have what I've got, people who put together interesting sites, sometimes only 1 or 2 a week, who take the time to go through my pain in the ass submission system, which involves an email fer fucks sake |huh
Something the auto-submitters have yet to figure out.
And I've been full time for over 10 years, so this ain't no hobby.

You hold them in disdain because you're automatic response is to label them as crybabes and whiners... Aren't you the one who just got thru a personal pity party and reopened your sites? Perhaps instead of spending all that time submitting sites by hand you should have been spending time accepting submissions and reviewing them to build up PR and real traffic to your site.. lets see.. right now one of your sites has sent me a total of 3 hits compared to an open submission site like greenguys that's sent the same free site 209 in the same period... This is a business and everything you do needs to be analized from a ROI standpoint.

I'm trying to have a serious discussion about the issue of auto-submitters and cheaters and how to combat them and all you guys can do is talk about crybabies and whiners. But if you want to sling shit go right ahead.. I'm in a piss poor mood anyway so should fit right in here...

SheepGuy, IMHO you have the easiest, most user friendly system I know out of all the lists bar two. Neither is better, just the same - one uses the same method and the other PMs.

I started the thread in question. I repeat, the only time I get pissed off with the precautions are when I can't read the fucking things or I make a typo and correcting it takes ten minutes instead of a couple of keystrokes. Other than that, I understand the reasons and I'm quite happy to live with the ones that are constructed sensibly.

Good for you, glad that's working out for you... Hate to burst your bubble, but sending email submissions is freakin easy... Perhaps there's another reason you don't get them... Your site has an Alexa ranking of 256,952.. Penisbot is at 4,182.. Based on my DB that puts you at about #71... Given my stats that show that a ranking in the range of 50k-60k could yield 20k-30k a day in visitors, I'd say that not having open submissions hasn't helped all that much with making your site a huge success..

I've only been doing adult full time for 6 years full time and at one point (before my downfall due to a woman), had the #1 big boobs site on the net (alhough shap and I would "disagree" about that sometimes)... I started out as a submitter and as such I treat the honest ones with respect because I remember how hard it was back then to build up the revenue and traffic. I actually go out of my way to try and make things "easy" for the honest ones... I value my "partners" in this business.

Whooaa hang on there Viper. I agree that most of the measures being taken are misguided, but you're not talking to a roomful of geeks.

What you're saying is like saying M$ is a marketing company, not a software company. All the geeks will agree, but the non-geeks have got the marketing message. It's way, way too late.

The fact is, since I posted that thread, all of the list owners who were making it hardest made a real effort to ease off, which perhaps suggests it's not all quite as introspective as you are telling yourself.

Besides which, SheepGuy is sending me a reasonable amount of traffic. No, not the top level but at the top of the next tier, so he can't be doing it all wrong.

Why do people complain about freeeeeee traffic?

I fail to see what my personal pity party has to do with anything. I didn't label submitters in general as whiners and crybabies. That was directed specifically at you.

So Greenie sends you about 70 times the traffic as I do, big deal, it means I'm doing better than I thought.

Which is why I'm attempting to educate and discuss... And for that I get called a "whiner" and a "crybaby"...

If you had to actually do something to get that traffic then it's not free. Your time is worth money...

Exactly.. and you had absolutely no cause to do that other than you don't want to hear the message, especially since you just reopened your sites for submission and now will have to deal with all of this again. What made you even think I was whining in the first place? I think I've clearly shown I have the skills to auto submit to every LL out there... So what's my purpose? As I said in the very first post, to educate.... I suspect you've turned your own frustration and anger towards auto submiters and cheaters on me... I've outlined in this thread and the other how everything you've done or are going to try and do is basically ineffective at stopping it.. So you'd rather shoot the messenger than try and have a discussion about how to work to make things better... You'd rather just carry on penalizing the honest hand submitters while accepting all the auto submitter sites.

Viper, I'm not a list owner. At this early stage in my involvement with this business, I have no idea whether I ever shall be. I also agree with some of the points you made about more proactive server side measures which can and should be taken against miscreants in order to make the lives of everybody here, in particular, easier.

However, I'm not convinced too may of these guys have enough server side access to be able to implement such measures, or the skills to do so if they had.

Take just one expression you used. A very practical, effective measure if implemented with the relevant level of discretion: IP blocking. Ffs, how many of the guys here even understand the term.

So let's take another: your inference that you could crack a random series of questions I find more questionable but I'll bet the guys here didn't. I'll bet their eyes just glazed over.

So if you want to discuss and educate, I'd respectfully suggest you attempt an awful lot of educating first. ;)

What would be the end result of this discussion? That the link list owners begin to demand the proper features in their LL software which is where all those things should be in the first place... but until the community builds a concensus, that won't happen.

I'm also "hopefull" that maybe some of the guys that write that software might stumble accross these threads and implement a bunch of these things all on their own. But then again, the LL side of things is so small compared to the TGP side that there might not be enough money it in for them to actually do it. Come to think of it.. Even with all the money and traffic on the TGP side I don't think there's any TGP software that deals with this stuff either...

If everybody's eyes glaze over and they all stumble off to bed, not much of any kind of demanding or provisioning is likely to materialise. |huh

IMHO, the question needs addressing from another direction. |potleaf|

And hey, folks, that's my hundredth post! Shit, I'm talking too much! |jester|

Cost effective? Sure it is. I've cut way back but for over a year I hand submitted to around 90 link lists. It took about an hour and a half. I can build a site in 3 hours and with the manual submission I was through in 5 hours. Cost effective? Sure, especially with the good will developed with quite a few link lists.

Now, are you trying to educate link list owners that there is a flaw in their captchas or educate submitters on how to defeat the captchas?

I guess you don't do TGP's

I agree with Licker4U's comments, especially the good will issue. I'm here for the long haul and building good relationships with link list owners is vital. What happens when those smaller link lists grow? I'd like to be able to say that I helped build up someone's business and they helped build mine.

How are they penalized? Not much will stop me from submitting my free sites, always by hand, especially a 30 second code issue. It's not a penalty, it's a great way to get quality traffic.
Is there some new way of doing this that that will make the link list owners' lives easier? Will it make my submitting a lot more fluid?
You sound either really bitter about something or you sound like you have a product to push somewhere down the line.

Man, spending an hour and a half breaking those codes, you could have built a decent freesite in that time!
Oh, and I'm a full-time submitter, approaching 500 freesites in almost two years, very few declines, I have five children and I like Abba.
:)

Congrats on the big 100 horney!

I think you're whining because you're making such a big deal out of nothing. While captcha may not be the final solution to LL owners' woes it does for a fact cut out a significant percentage of the crap and I fail to see that it's such an inconvenience to submitters. You may be enough of a wiz kid to fool my script (or anybody else's), but if you had done your homework and checked my Alexa ranking you would have known it was a waste of time in the first place.

Just get over it. If you're as experienced in this business as you say you are, you must know by now that there's actually some work involved.

You can preach the benefits of autosubmitting 'til you're blue in the face, but I don't think you're gonna find many converts here.

I'd say the bottom line is the linklist owner's rules are THEIR rules...it's their linklist and it's the empire they made, some big and some not soo big. Don't submit to the not so big ones if you don't want to waste your time. I would think you're going to get blacklisted by promoting circumventing rules...then you'll have to change your forum name and start over...Maybe you should start a thread asking people how they make better use of their time and do their submissions? I agree with Toby...except I'd prefer whoppers over popcorn

Me too! :D

Is it cost effective? So how much do you actually make for those 5 hours? If you're not making at least $50 an hour then I'm sorry to say it's simply not... I've seen some very long time submitters post saying the same thing you have.. Doing a site a day and hand submitting.. They've publicly stated that their income from that is $1500 - $2000 a month, MAYBE $3000.. That's not cost effective, that's hobby money.

Did I say how to defeat the catpcha? No... Seems pretty clear to me...

Yeah I do.. what's your point? If you're putting any of your time into it then it's not "free"... Everything costs something.. What's your time worth?

|popcorn|

Never mind.. It's not worth responding to other than to say I don't have a product and won't have a product related to this.

Go back and read what I've actually been attempting to communicate... Nowhere have I preached the benifits of auto-submitting...

Please state what you are trying to communicate. I've read this thread a bunch of times and you are the only one I'm not following.

Before you do to me what you've done to my friends, Lemmy and Sheepguy - I'm not claiming to have any traffic. There, now you don't have to insult my abilities or my lists.

I don't know how else to interpret this.

Usually I just ignore those that "attack" me first but as I said, my patience level for that today is very low... You've called me "names" in the past.. Thanks for not jumping on the bandwagon... yet...

I would think it's very clear what I'm trying to communicate.. Captcha, partner signups.. None of that is going to stop what you're trying to stop.. In fact, it tends to make it worse as you end up getting less "real" people sending you submissions.. So your % of crap to good goes up... Also, if you're not seeing what the cheaters are submitting, then it makes it harder to actually catch them... The phrase about keeping your enemies closer does actually apply here as well.

In the other thread I gave a list of some solutions to the problems of cheaters and auto-submitters.. In this thread I've said clearly that all those solutions should be part of the software you use and that if the LL owners actually discussed this and realized that the tools they're using are inadequate, they could get the software companies to build better tools for them... Keep in mind that I know that not ALL of the LLs have crap tools... The top few LLs are going to have some good tools.. but it's all the other LL owners I'm atempting but clearly failing at reaching.

You know... why the fuck do I even care... Truth is.. the more failures there are out there the more money I (and the big LLS owners) can make.. and I should have known better than try and have this sort of discussion on this board... I'm going to respond to Lemmy again and then go eat something and relax..

That's hillarious.. you take those 9 words and ignore everything else I've said including a bunch of solutions to cheaters etc. I put in that other thread.. Way to go!!!!!

Yep.. at this point, it's simply not cost effective to submit to the majority of the LLs out there by hand... In fact, I was going to make some posts about how some of you smaller LL owners could adapt and get more traffic into your sites to actually make it cost effective which would benifit everyone.. But given the repsonses to date it's clearly not going to be worth it...

It's a shame really... On a couple other boards people love it when I post this type of information, advice, write some script for them to use or write an "article" about some WM topic etc. This board just has a really weird attitude about things. You just can't rock the status quo.

I should probably stay out of this, but against my better judgment I just want to say that each forum is going to have it's core group of contributors and that's more than likely because they've networked with each other and have a similar ideology and code of conduct and have stayed in the biz over time when the majority of webmasters drop like flies ...I could totally see what you're saying about other boards wanting hacks and shortcuts...I belong to those forums too and I go to those forums when I'm looking for that information...this isn't that forum...GG&J is a peer evaluated/governed community that play by the same rules. If you're not down with the LL rules, you're probably not going to last...there's not really short cuts to be had in this community from what I've seen and I like that...people don't give out software codes/serials and they don't see what scams they can conjure to convert the surfers for the short term...it's about building quality content for the long term...and a good quality freesite might hang around for a while and get you those conversions two+ years down the road...that's residual income you don't get when you scam...that's just my two cents...best of luck to you...

Do you honestly consider my request for clarification an attack?
No - it's not clear. Admitting that you've created a hack to bypass Penisbot's captcha, which is probably the simplest and clearest in the business, does not communicate anything other than your foolishness by publicly announcing such a thing. But that tends to be the hacker's mindset, that whole "I hacked your site to show you that it wasn't secure" mentality.
That makes zero sense. None at all.
Ah! So making it simpler for the cheaters will actually make our lives easier and more profitable. That makes sense. Oh wait - no it doesn't.
You clearly don't know what tools any of us use. Yet you are telling us that our scripts are insufficient? Why would you complain about our tools if WE aren't?

You never see the big traffic guys complaining about being flooded with auto submissions and you obviously have no respect for the smaller lists. So I'm not sure why you are complaining.
Are you having a bad day? Is that what this all comes down to?

No, not ignoring, but putting into context. You're bitching about some simple, non-intrusive security measures, bragging about breaking PB's captcha AND saying that handsubmission is waste of time.

I was refering to your friends and my response to them (which you refered to), not you...
Maybe you need re-read as well and actually have an open mind.... what did I say in that very first post.. "...to educate....".. I also said in the title "...further to the Captcha discussion...", which, if you take the time to read and comprehend, I outline how easy it is to break these systems and I outline a few other far better methods that can be used to combat the problem of cheaters...
Interesting way to interpret my post.. But the reality is that when people have their heads in the sand or don't want to admit something to themselves, it's the only way to actually get them to look at it.. by showing them.. Pretty simple thing to undersand...
So now two of you are lumping me in with hackers.. that's just hillarious and extremely far from the truth... But typical of people that have a lynch mob mentality.. pretty soon you're going to be calling me a thief... Or better yet, you'll just start calling me names when you run out of arguments.. Oh wait.. I have yet to see any real discussion, just mostly statements of dismisal... If I was a hacker, I'd be posting on the board about selling the code to someone... Just ridiculous...
I'm sorry that you're unable to grasp the concept.
ummm... what part of "you're not stopping the real cheaters anyway" are you not getting??? And yeah, it does make perfect sense if you actually have a back end that handles it... I guess you didn't read the other thread either and how my own custom software does a shit load of things for me so that I can actually accept submissiosn without captcha or partner accounts...
You're making assumptions that I don't know what your tools can do... Pretty funny... You aren't complaining because you don't realize, or never think about the fact that, you could have better tools.. You think that what you have is fantastic.. You'll just take whatever you're given and thank them..
As I said, I suspect the bigger traffic guys have better custom tools themselves to do a bunch of the things I've mentioned.. oh wait.. they actually run a successfull business and so can have employees.. They can hire cheap labour if they want to do reviews for them... but the smaller ones can't afford that...

I'm not complaining.... I'm trying to "help" but I guess you can't help people who are stuck in a rut and can't see over the edge of it.. or don't want to be helped because they like working for peanuts.
You must have a bad day every day then.. I'm just playing along with the rest of you that like to "attack" people for having opinions and a point of view different than yours.

You guys are hillarious... 37 replies in this thread and not one of you has actually even attempted to discuss the issue of cheaters and auto-submitters... Even if you think I'm full of shit I would have thought someone would have attempted to talk about it... But you're just happy to attack me instead... I guess if I was a good ol' LL boy things would be different... Oh well.. been a long time since I've been in a good pissing match.

With the pure quantity of shit I've said in this and the other thread you choose to put it into that context.. Sad...

Yep.. hand submission IS a waste of time if the ROI isn't there.. Pretty basic business sense.. How could anyone not understand that...

I wasn't "bragging"... As I said in the title of this thread, this was a continuation of that other thread... I was pointing out how fast and easy it was to break it.. In other words.. If I can do it, then every serious cheater out there has done it and is submitting to all those link lists.. So it's basically a waste of time for everyone...