Topic: Spammers

[Trop]

I only count 9 boards but yeah they're going nuts.  Is somebody around here actually clicking on their ads?

[Revned]

There's a secret board >_>

[Trop]

Ah.  Well if they appear on that board you know there's a problem.

[Will]

I have a different idea which will halt the spammers enough to buy time for an overall solution, but I don't think you'll like it. My suggestion is to block membership signing directly from the forum and any visitors who would wish to join us would have to e-mail the administrator for an invitation. Just a primitive filter that's all.

[Peardian]

That would certainly work, but it would also drive away potential legitimate users who are unsure about joining. It would be wiser to try something like the IP filter first beforehand, but it is a plausible fallback plan.


Speaking of the filter, is anyone going to implement it? It's been a whole month since I brought it up.

[Maxim]

One very effective thing I did on my site's forums was to make it impossible for people to post URLs in their first 5 posts. Spammers don't like that.

[Peardian]

That's quite clever, though the problem there is that the spambots are still able to register and still have to be deleted manually. Ideally, we want a system that will prevent bots from being able to create accounts in the first place.

[Peardian]

Can we please implement this already?

It's been over six weeks and we've only just discussed it and possible alternatives, and the spambots just keep getting worse. We really have nothing to lose from trying it.

[JonLeung]

I'll email bustin about it tonight.  I admit I'm not that competent when it comes to forum stuff, so he's the man for the technical stuff.

What I have been doing recently, though, is manually looking at new members before even asking for the required activation.  As I look at the upcoming members list, I use my own judgment to remove those with suspicious-looking email addresses and I also sort them by IP to remove them if there are multiple ones from that same IP address.  And then when there is trouble, instead of just banning a user by name, I now ban the IPs they register and post with, and all the other possible ban trigger options relating to that username and IP.  I really should have done that before.  It's not going to stop the really persistent ones, but it might help a little until bustin implements upgrades to the forum software.

[Peardian]

Fifty posts and counting. That is one crazy spambot.

[Trop]

It does seem to be getting crazier.

[Peardian]

Can we please implement this already?

It's been over six weeks and we've only just discussed it and possible alternatives, and the spambots just keep getting worse. We really have nothing to lose from trying it.

And now it's been three months since this post. Has anything been done about this yet?

[bustin98]

I didn't see this before. Its an interesting idea, so we'll see how it goes. The problem of course is that IP addresses change all the time for spammers. And they just spoof good ones, so its possible a real person is going to get blocked.

[Peardian]

I hadn't considered the chance of spoofing. Well, it runs through the Stop Forum Spam website, and checks email as well, so I imagine there shouldn't be too much of a problem with real users getting blocked.

[TerraEsperZ]

...And we've got another bot spammer.