The Spam is driving me nuts!!

t_3 · Mon Mar 12, 2012 2:05 pm

matej wrote:I haven't been much around in the previous week, but it seems to me there is less spam? (or is the Sheriff office doing a thorough job cleaning )

its only less visible. still no real barrier keeping them out in first place. and there are more and more coming in visible even though their first posts should need to be approved; must be hacked then...

Fri Apr 06, 2012 8:49 pm

this is automatic spam bot .. hacked into the code of this forum, as this forum is not enough secured
I hope our personal information are save , as that is what they look for also, your e-mails addresses and all stuff

t_3 · Fri Apr 06, 2012 9:40 pm

MEC4D wrote:this is automatic spam bot .. hacked into the code of this forum, as this forum is not enough secured
I hope our personal information are save , as that is what they look for also, your e-mails addresses and all stuff

rest assured, the forum is not hacked in anyway - this is just plain spamming because of a weak captcha. also email addresses are not shown in the user profile, thus those bots can't get hold of them either.

sadly the forum uses an old phpbb captcha which is no problem for spam bots nowadays. therefore new spammers register every day... easy to see from the members list. most of the spam is held back because new posts need to be approved by mods, but this measure is in place for about 6 weeks only - as there are also spam bots, which register silently and start spamming weeks or even months after registering, and thus there are still a few such posts, which become visible to other members from time to time...

Fri Apr 06, 2012 9:58 pm

I saw couple of them posted today straight to the forum the account show activity from past already and never was block by the admin, this mean tomorrow another posts , it is also hard to block the IP as they use fake one , but blocking the account from future posting would be better than remove them , as they are not real people .

t_3 · Fri Apr 06, 2012 10:11 pm

MEC4D wrote:I saw couple of them posted today straight to the forum the account show activity from past already and never was block by the admin, this mean tomorrow another posts , it is also hard to block the IP as they use fake one , but blocking the account from future posting would be better than remove them , as they are not real people .

nothing new, as we are fighting them since last summer, when our forum seemed to appear on some spammers radar.

but apparently as long as "the new forum" isn't up and running, there won't be much to do but kill them as soon as they appear. the forum update was delayed quite some times now, but common community sense is, that we favor new octane features over a new forum, since resources are limited in .nz

Fri Apr 06, 2012 10:48 pm

at the same time as they attacked also my forum last summer , but so intensive that I just shut it down as I can't handle it anymore and there was nothing I can do at the moment even if I approved registration they just pass it anyway . The focus on the forum codes used by public and the spam bots are wrote just to break the general settings.

I hope the new forum works better .

Mon Apr 23, 2012 11:54 am

Has the new policy completely broken down now because we appear to be back to the terrible level of spam that we were a month ago. Once again it is getting to the stage where I click on the forum, see the spam and go elsewhere. I use the "View new posts" button to see what is new and at the moment 90+% of what is new is spam.

Mon Apr 23, 2012 1:33 pm

"I use the "View new posts" button to see what is new and at the moment 90+% of what is new is spam." i do the same, getting to forum and look for active topics, but from first page is good enough if three threads are actually not spam =)

Well, don't know 'bout technology behing this forum, but CAPCHAs might be an option to get like human factor before posting anything. That wouldn't be a big problem for users & shoulnd't be very hard to impliment..'cos with amount of spam it looks that the bots are runing..blocking IPs is not any good in this way, 'cos they are probably running on proxy servers by defaul, changing their IP frequently =)

Mon Apr 23, 2012 1:51 pm

glimpse wrote:"I use the "View new posts" button to see what is new and at the moment 90+% of what is new is spam." i do the same, getting to forum and look for active topics, but from first page is good enough if three threads are actually not spam =)

Well, don't know 'bout technology behing this forum, but CAPCHAs might be an option to get like human factor before posting anything. That wouldn't be a big problem for users & shoulnd't be very hard to impliment..'cos with amount of spam it looks that the bots are runing..blocking IPs is not any good in this way, 'cos they are probably running on proxy servers by defaul, changing their IP frequently =)

CAPCHAs aren't stopping the SPAM bots, nor is the moderation tool (which implies a bug in the forum software - we are looking into it). 90% of these bots are from China. We're blocking each of those IP ranges, which we have not tried before.

As we look at a forum upgrade to solve this issue, we're just doing manual cleanup. The SPAM from this morning should be gone now, and we'll check in every few hours to keep it that way.

necko77 · Mon Apr 23, 2012 2:45 pm

Goldorak wrote:
glimpse wrote:"I use the "View new posts" button to see what is new and at the moment 90+% of what is new is spam." i do the same, getting to forum and look for active topics, but from first page is good enough if three threads are actually not spam =)

Well, don't know 'bout technology behing this forum, but CAPCHAs might be an option to get like human factor before posting anything. That wouldn't be a big problem for users & shoulnd't be very hard to impliment..'cos with amount of spam it looks that the bots are runing..blocking IPs is not any good in this way, 'cos they are probably running on proxy servers by defaul, changing their IP frequently =)
CAPCHAs aren't stopping the SPAM bots, nor is the moderation tool (which implies a bug in the forum software - we are looking into it). 90% of these bots are from China. We're blocking each of those IP ranges, which we have not tried before.

As we look at a forum upgrade to solve this issue, we're just doing manual cleanup. The SPAM from this morning should be gone now, and we'll check in every few hours to keep it that way.

hi Goldorak,
plz, can you introduce your self ?

thx