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Spammers away!

Posted: Mon May 15, 2006 9:48 am
by Brazilian dude
Dear all,

as you may have noticed, recently we have been bombarded by spambots.

Thanks to the “visual confirmation”, robots cannot “activate themselves”, but until a few days ago could nevertheless start the registration process, which involves inserting their data into their personal profiles.

The first step we took (behind the scenes) to stem the tide was to prevent inactive users’ profiles from being shown.

This spares the users the dreadful sight of hyperlinks to irrelevant or dubious web sites (and makes spambots’ work virtually useless [but they don’t realize that!]), but does not prevent our forum database from being overfilled with such spam, and the administrator from having to periodically remove it. What’s more, spambots operate in cycles, so that the purging may never end.

That’s why we decided to make another slight change to our forum: from now on users will be able to enter their signature or the hyperlink to their web site only after they submitted 10 posts. This measure prevents spambots even form registering, since they usually try to send their signature and web site data directly, bypassing the relevant form. Not only: in this way, spambots are immediately identified as such and their IP address is banned straightaway —we've already caught three of them (a Kenyan, a Brazilian and a Korean one)!

The only nuisance for you legitimate users is, besides the posts lower bound itself, the impossibility of editing your signature or web site hyperlink, had you entered them already (and not reached the set limit of posts yet).

If anyone urgently needs to change these data (and is unable or unwilling to wait to reach the minimum amount of posts), please feel free to contact me with a private message and I’ll amend the data myself.

Many thanks.
www.achyra.org/cruscate

Can't you do the same thing here?

Brazilian dude

Posted: Mon May 15, 2006 11:56 am
by tcward
That looks like a pretty good plan, but I would increase the number of posts to at least 50, to allow posting of links.

-Tim

Posted: Tue May 16, 2006 1:49 pm
by Stargzer
Hmm. Ten, or even five, may be OK. That type of info should be in a image file so a spambot can't be made to look for or read the number of posts needed. Otherwise, when this type of hoop eventually becomes required for new users to jump through on all boards, spambots will be updated to look for that type of info and will make a few innocuous posts before spamming.

Posted: Tue May 16, 2006 6:27 pm
by tcward
I still think 10 is too few. I know other forums expect much more than that from new members before they are granted the privilege of posting links to external sites.

-Tim

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 1:31 am
by Stargzer
Well, then, that shoots the ability of a newbie to back up a post with a link to, say, a dictionary site to document a definition.

I assume other boards wish to encourage participation and use that as a carrot to entice users to post. We don't have that problem here; people either post or lurk. I'm more worried about cutting out the spammers and porn merchants. Since the death penalty is not a viable option here, we have to find some other way to deal with them.

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 1:26 pm
by tcward
Yes, it does limit newbies' ability to do that. WordReference Forums have such a limit. You can still paste the link, it just won't be a live hyperlink in your post.

-Tim

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 6:10 pm
by Stargzer
Thinking of the title of this thread, "Spammers Away!", it sounds like we've dropped a load of them out of the bomb-bay doors. 'Tis a pity we can't do that--without parachutes--in real life.

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 6:41 pm
by Bailey
can we toss out trojan and DNS throwers too. If so I'll help you.

mark
still trying to get clicker.bb trojan out of my pc.

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 9:08 pm
by Brazilian dude
Maybe a comma would be in order there: Spammers, away, to set off the vocative from the rest of the sentence.

Brazilian dude

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 9:56 pm
by Flaminius
can we toss out trojan and DNS throwers too. If so I'll help you.

mark
still trying to get clicker.bb trojan out of my pc.

I hope this site help you;
http://www.computing.net/security/wwwbo ... board.html

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 10:58 pm
by Bailey
Thanks I'll try it.

mark

Posted: Thu May 18, 2006 5:06 am
by Flaminius
And this is a black list of bad guys.

http://sysinfo.org/startuplist.php

Posted: Thu May 18, 2006 6:46 pm
by Stargzer
can we toss out trojan and DNS throwers too. If so I'll help you.

mark
still trying to get clicker.bb trojan out of my pc.
No, I think something more excruciating should be in store for virus and trojan writers. A root canal without anesthesia would still be too mild a punishment for them.

Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 12:15 pm
by LukeJavan8
And this is a black list of bad guys.

http://sysinfo.org/startuplist.php
This site still works, and is up to date as of Jan.