Corrupt data?

[Shentino]

Forum URL: multiple.proboardsXX.com

furtonya.proboards41.com/index.cgi?board=Fan&action=display&thread=1134757593

I get a whole bunch of random gobbledegook.

What's going on?

I also saw this at another forum on a different server so I'm a little concerned.

[Snakeair]

shentino said:

Forum URL: multiple.proboardsXX.com

furtonya.proboards41.com/index.cgi?board=Fan&action=display&n=1&thread=1134757593

I get a whole bunch of random gobbledegook.

What's going on?

I also saw this at another forum on a different server so I'm a little concerned.

That's a chinese spam bot. Either disable guests from posting on each board or try out this code to prevent this from happening. support.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=codedatabase&action=display&n=1&thread=70493

[Martyn Dale]

Has anyone had any success with that code?

I have had a look and i dont see how it will work for several reasons

1. If its a typical bot, it will be using a text based type browser, ignoring any CSS and JS, therefore able to post anyway
2. The reason the characters in the posts appear as they do, is because the posts are made initially with unicode chracters (16bit), which when saved on the server, get converted to the characters seen on the post, as we only store 8 bit character values, so it ends up with random characters based on the 1st (or last) 8 bits of the 16

Therefore at the point of posting, none of the characters on the list will be actully used, as it will still be unicode