how to prevent spam bots from joining groups in Telegram? - telegram

I have a group in Telegram that is bombarded by spammers/bots. We have Shieldy enabled, which gets rid of most of the spammers within a few seconds, but the notifications that come a few times per day get really annoying. There is no setting in the group setting that is able to prevent it. How can I restrict the group so that only invited people can join the group?

It can't be entirely avoided.
Change the group settings to "Invite link" in Settings > Manage Group. Revoke the permanent link to regenerate it.
That should reduce your visibility to only "Groups nearby" and require the invite link for anyone else. BUT invite links can be easily generated and tested for validity by a spam bot.
Add a bot like Shieldy (https://botostore.com/c/shieldy_bot/) to your group. It will further aid in restricting new members capabilities, especially bot ID's and uses Captcha verification. Bots can kick genuine people though so watch it carefully.

Related

Avoid more than one purchase from the same IP

Good afternoon from Spain, guys.
I will try to be as specific as possible.
I want to create a free physical product in my ecommerce (WP + WC) for which I will only charge a couple of dollars for shipping.
To avoid cheating, apart from checking fields such as email and selling the product individually, I was wondering if it is possible to display a notice such as "IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO MAKE MORE THAN ONE PURCHASE WITH THE SAME IP"
Any ideas?
Thank you :-)
Check this code out to restrict same-IP purchases.
That said - if your aim is to restrict purchases to one user, your best bet is to validate the user themselves (email/username).
The reason for this is:
It's possible for one user to unintentionally access a page through many IPs (say VPN disconnects)
It's possible for many users to use the same IP (via NAT).
IP should not be used for validation such as this.
And if you're already using emails, that should be good enough.

Can I extract and automatically message users on a TG group?

I’m part of a telegram group. I can see other users on the group, and I can message them individually (and manually). Is it possible to automatically (programmatically) message all the users on the group individually? Note I am not the admin.
If it is indeed possible, is there any sample code you can share?
It would be particularly awesome if the message could be customized for admin and non-admin. This means I’d need to detect if a particular user is an admin.
Thanks
I'm not sure if I get what you are looking for but I assume you have a Telegram Bot and wanna message all users in an specific group/supergroup. First I have to remind you bot can't start private message according to this link
Bots can't initiate conversations with users. A user must either add them to a group or send them a message first.
If I got it wrong feel free leave comment and I will update the answer ASAP ;-) ^_^

Google analytics track user behavior. Or possible?

I am searching for a way to track user behavior on my website. I want to know if it is possible to get a table with data looking something like this:
+------+---------------+-----------------+------+---------+
| time | ip or user_id | user_session_id | link | actions |
+------+---------------+-----------------+------+---------+
(Link - where user came from)
I want to track different user actions by sessions. Is this possible using Google Analytics or I should search other tools? My site is currently set up to track events but on my Analytics account I get only the number of events that occurred. I want to track what a specific user does on my site.
tl;dr: if you must do this use Mixpanel or similar software.
Time based dimensions are already available (date, hour, minutes and datetime). "link" would be referrer. Actions in Google Analytics are basically pageviews, events and transactions, so you have that, too.
IP and user id are a big no-gos. Storing anything that that identifies a person is a violation of Googles Terms of Service and depending on your location might be a violation of national laws.And if by user_id you mean the Google Analytics feature of the same name, Google says you may set it for logged in users and have to unset it for user that log out, so by extension that means storing it in Ga would probably be a violation of their TOS.
The GA session id is not exposed via the interface. You may read it from the cookie and store it in a custom dimension (I'm not sure if this is allowed within the TOS, on the other hand GA premium customers get this via a BigQuery export in any case, so it should be allowed).
If you simply want to tell different users apart you might simply generate a string in the UUID format and store that in a custom dimension. If you want to actually identify users (by name, adress etc), well, you are not allowed to and Google will terminate your account if they find out.
Not to mention that it completely eludes why so many people want to track individual users. You must not use GA information to target individuals, and simply looking at individual user paths will not help you (I wrote an article about that, although I do not expect that this will convince you).
Google Analytics is for technical and legal reasons not a good tool for tracking individual users, if you need to do this use a software that is made for this purpose. Mixpanel is often mentioned in that context but I'm sure there are many other solutions.

Can I do this with Drupal and Organic Groups?

Basically I have a site in which I want my clients to be owners of a group, and then anonymous users can add nodes through their group and my clients will receive notification if someone adds a node in their group.
Basically the service is a lead generation service so in effect the content type is a landing page and when anonymous users go to put their details in, dependent on which group they do it through, the client will receive the notification.
i.e. My clients group is www.example.com/group1 and they send out a link with their URL to generate some leads.
example.com/group1/node/add/landing-page
Once this node has been created, will it be possible to notify the group1 owner (I assume if I set the correct Rules)?
On top of this, I want the group1 owner to be able to login and see a Views display of all the nodes that have been created in their group.
I assume Organic Groups is the wway to go here, but I may be mistaken - any hep would be appreciated.
Unless this has dramatically changed in D7, I don't think you're going to be able to let anonymous users post into Groups. The whole concept and structure of OG relies on users being logged in and identifiable.
In other words, I think you have to be a member of a Group to post in it, and anonymous (user 0) can never belong to a Group.

Counting anonymous votes accurately

I'm building a small application that highly depends on anonymous user voting on some sort of items. It's so small that requiring registration would be tedious and could not be justified.
Anyway, I did some research on this, including a search here on stackoverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=anonymous+votes), and doesn't seem that there's a satisfying answer.
My question is: are there any security measures that I can apply to prevent gaming anonymous votes?
One thing comes to mind is CAPTCHA, but I'd like to avoid that since users will vote on multiple items in a very short period of time, and CAPTCHAs will just annoy them.
Another thing I thought of is limiting the number of votes per minutes from a single IP (in addition to a cookie), but not sure how this is going to work.
Any thoughts?
There are a few ways I've seen work:
Email registration : you get their email, they need to confirm their vote. The combination of their IP + email makes a unique record that they can't then use to vote again (for the same poll).
Captcha : without having additional checks (IP, etc), it's easy enough for a team of monkeys to successfully enter a lot of captchas.
Site Registration : without account creation level limits (e.g. a non-free email account required for signing up) people can just create multiple accounts.
Depending on how you weigh up the cost of getting users to vote vs making sure their votes are for them and them alone, you can use a different level of vote-spam-protection.
You can use the CAPTCHA once to both confirm the vote and create a session with the IP and cookie.
Any time you are dealing with anonymous voting you are going to have an imperfect solution but you can shoot for "pretty good". Consider dropping a cookie on the client computer to prevent multiple/frequent voting and back this up by performing server side IP tracking to do the same. Do not allow anyone to vote that has cookies blocked.
Of course, if you require complete accuracy or if the voting involves awarding of something of monetary value, registration is really the way to go.

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