Originally posted by Sneeza™:

Okay, I just pushed an update that should help throttle the amount of requests that the bots are able to send out. We'll continue to look into other solutions but for now you should see a reduction in the rate that invites are being sent.

I don't know what you did, but it is working pretty well, not a single phishing bot added me in the past 2 hours

ty ~

Some of the banners that exist on outpost redirect automatically to a fake site, that says to update flash player and download some executable file, you don't even have to click on the banner.
Even that it is not outpost.com fault and happens to any site that use the same banner provider, some browsers (like firefox and chrome) start to tag outpost as a harmfull site.

don't you understand that this is ALREADY ruining, not only the user experience but the user itself, each account stolen is another "legit" bot, and a VERY angry/sad user, outpost could offer the best service in the entire world, but it means nothing if there is 3rd party people screwing with everything. And ofc, an army of bot trying to steal your items and account are much more friendly to new traders than a simple captcha. The point of the rank is just to reduce the ammount of time between the requets to the server, how long take to read an entire page of offers ? at least 1 minute, so this is threshold to NOT show captchas, you can request a new page before, but then you would have to type a simply captcha.
But, in the end my opnion means nothing, i'm just a single user in the entire community.
So, why don't you ask the entire community? an open poll in the main page of outpost "captchas vs the_actual_scenery", i'm not a psychic, but i'm pretty sure that the winner would be the captchas...

Well, everyone here know the misspelledsite.com/pyroman, but how to stop them?
As developer this is my humble sugestion:
The best way to stop bots is simple : CAPTCHA
"zomg please i can't use outpost anymore with those stupid letters"
do not freak out and read the complete idea.

how it would work :
-> "rank" based system, lower ranks would have a high delay (1~5 min to refresh or open another page), any try before the time ends would request a captcha.
-> users that aren't logged , have private profiles/backpacks, empty backpack would have the lowest rank (and the highest delay)
-> the rank would increase with the value of your backpack, the time of your steam account, tf2 played hours and numbers of outpost trades/posts
-> every new trade would require a captcha

Keep in mind that this would not only affect the dummy accounts, hijacked accounts would have a shorter delay, but wouldn't be able to gather data at the same (almost instant) speed as they do today.

In the other side, for the normal traders, you would be able to bypass this just by typing the captcha.

Downsides :
- captchas everywhere
- reduced by increasing your rank
- 3rd party sites wouldn't be able to gather data from outpost (sry trade.tf :c )
- a private api could solve this


Please, don't let this idea die, theses phishing bots must be stopped

ps : sry for any grammar error (english isn't my mother language)