I widely advertise my instant messaging ID’s as I want potential clients to be able to find me easily. But the problem with doing that is that I end up with a lot of spam messages every day.
Never a day goes by without automated robots sending me instant messages inviting me to talk dirty with them or to go to a certain website to stock up on my Viagra tablets. Now normally I would just block them but this only really works for one or two messages a day.
If you are getting more than a few a day, you may need Bot Sentry. Bot Sentry guards your Pidgin application and disallows anyone not on your contact list from contacting you until they have answered a pre-defined question that you have set :
As you can see, you can decide what question and answer to set and when the person has answered correctly, they can then message you and their user ID will be added to a "white list" so they don’t have to answer the question everytime they want to chat with you.
But make the question easy - don’t write something like "Please give the exact population figure of Transylvania - including all the vampires". Just give an easy question with only one possible answer that a real person can answer right away. Obviously this will stop the automated bots in their tracks and you can now enjoy your day without IM’s popping up inviting you to join the Gay Network.
(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger, writer and English tutor. Check out his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net
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Filed Under: How-To
Tags: How-To, instant messaging, multi-protocol IM, Pidgin
Thank you. Why the hell is this extremely useful plugin missing from pidgin.im’s webpages? I love it!
Upgrade Request: Spam Executioner
I cant really see the usefulness of this plugin because every time it blocks a spam it still opens a conversation to tell me that it blocked something and is just as annoying as the spam. Whats the difference in closing the spam message or having to close the bot sentry message? Unless I am missing a way to turn off the blocked messages.
I agree with Mario. Is there a way to not open a conversation and notify me that i blocked something? If that is done, this plugin is perfect and should be included in the Pidgin distribution.
Agreed, this is useless if you still have to close a window.
I have never received a conversation window to tell me that it has blocked a spam. This is completely new news to me. In all the time that I have used this (and it must be two years now), I have never once received any kind of notification.
Yeah I would agree that this is useless if I keep getting a window that I have to close. My windows however say the following:
(10/29/2008 4:29:36 PM) Message could not be sent because an error with the switchboard occurred:
Bot Sentry engaged: you are now being ignored! Your message will be delivered if you can correctly answer the following question within 10 minutes: How do you spell 10?
If there was a way to make these go away then I’d be happy as can be. However, I haven’t been able to find any other solution to this and figured I’d try to give this a try.
OK, that’s what the other side is seeing and you should NOT be seeing that. I don’t see that on my screen so I don’t understand why you see that on yours.
I am going to try and contact the developer of Bot Sentry and see if he can address this issue. This is really bothering me now.
Anything on that, I’m receiving the same message.
I’m getting the same thing too
Anybody filed a support ticket / bug report?
I’m getting the same problem - Anyone figure something out yet?
Same issue here using Ubuntu 8.10. Very frustrating.
Same as everyone else. Dunno why this happens with pidgin either, I’ve never gotten spam bots like this using Trillian…
What service are you getting them from? I get them from MSN. I just decided to block anyone who isn’t on my contact list on MSN, and it works fine so far.
Yea its from MSN as well. That seems to be the main problem. I recently did the same thing as well. But it annoys me that anyone who wants to contact me via MSN will have to contact me via other means first so i can add them to my buddy list. Oh well. Annoying messages are gone. Thats all that matters. (Yes it works for me as well)