Send SpamBots to Purgatory!

[rthorvald]

Since it seems to be difficult to filter out the spambots for now, i suggest that one moves Purgatory to the top of the Forum list: then all the trash goes there (since the bots always seem to post in the topmost forum in a list: it is a behaviour i have seen elsewhere, too).

Alternately, how about a *new* forum at the top. Named "Welcome Spambots!"

- rthorvald

[selden]

spam appears in all of the Forums.
I delete it when I see it, so you probably aren't seeing all of them.

[rthorvald]

spam appears in all of the Forums.
I delete it when I see it, so you probably aren't seeing all of them.

oh Ok... I guess i check the User Forum more often or something... Well, send this thread to purgatory instead, then

- rthorvald

[Malenfant]

I dunno actually, I've been keeping track of it and I have observed that spam does mostly appear in the Users forum too. I think I did suggest a 'spam' forum at the top to Selden in a PM a while back too.

[ElChristou]

If only Chris had the time to implement a better registration process...

[Dollan]

Does a forum with "spam" in the title attract the 'bots or something?

...John...

[bdm]

If we implemented a few account restrictions for new accounts, that would make life more difficult for the spammers. If new accounts could not post messages for 30 minutes and not create threads for 24 hours, this could reduce the spam.

[Malenfant]

That would require Chris to take an active role in the forum's administration, which seems to be something he's not (and apparently never has been) willing to do. It's really annoying that he doesn't just hand over Admin privileges to Selden, since Selden is actually on the forums regularly.

[ElChristou]

That would require Chris to take an active role in the forum's administration, which seems to be something he's not (and apparently never has been) willing to do. It's really annoying that he doesn't just hand over Admin privileges to Selden, since Selden is actually on the forums regularly.

Why active? This kind of settings must be done once for all, no?

[Malenfant]

That would require Chris to take an active role in the forum's administration, which seems to be something he's not (and apparently never has been) willing to do. It's really annoying that he doesn't just hand over Admin privileges to Selden, since Selden is actually on the forums regularly.

Why active? This kind of settings must be done once for all, no?

Even that seems too active a contribution for Chris - he just doesn't seem to want to do this sort of admin stuff himself, and doesn't seem to want to let anyone else do it either. So til he decides to sort something out, Selden is going to have to keep deleting the spammers because they're not going to get permabanned and they're going to keep coming in because there is nothing in place to block them.

I also notice that Chris has generally disappeared again...

[Chuft-Captain]

Even that seems too active a contribution for Chris - he just doesn't seem to want to do this sort of admin stuff himself, and doesn't seem to want to let anyone else do it either. So til he decides to sort something out, Selden is going to have to keep deleting the spammers because they're not going to get permabanned and they're going to keep coming in because there is nothing in place to block them.

I also notice that Chris has generally disappeared again...

Given that the website's hosted on Chris' machine, I would think it's perfectly reasonable that he does not give admin privileges to anyone else.
Perhaps he just gives a slightly higher priority to bug fixes and enhancements for the next version of Celestia (I hope), than chasing spammers. I personally think that's a better use of his time anyway.
They (spam posts) usually seem fairly obvious, so I'd suggest just not reading them and then maybe they won't annoy you so much.

[ElChristou]

Chuft, the only bad point of leting bots doing what they want is that the image of the community is becoming quite bad (not serious at all)... I mean when I came here for first time there was quite interresting discutions and almost no spams, so the idea of becoming member was attractive. Now we have the contrary; a bunch of bots every days and only a few interesting topics... I think I wouldn't contract membership in this context... this means we are perhaps losing some interesting members... (note that this not mean I'm an interesting person... )

[t00fri]

Chuft, the only bad point of leting bots doing what they want is that the image of the community is becoming quite bad (not serious at all)... I mean when I came here for first time there was quite interresting discutions and almost no spams, so the idea of becoming member was attractive. Now we have the contrary; a bunch of bots every days and only a few interesting topics... I think I wouldn't contract membership in this context... this means we are perhaps losing some interesting members... (note that this not mean I'm an interesting person... )

I just wrote an email to Chris (Laurel) about this whole issue. I completely agree with ElChristou (Chris ) in this respect. In my opinion the image loss that this forum suffers is intolerable. I tend to loose my good reputation being a member here any longer.

I was counting a bit over the weekend: per day it's typically 4-8 SEX bots & other Ferkels and ONLY 1-3 regular posts, the latter being often dead-boring! What a shame.

Besides SEX that's a typical regular post

I INSIST that Mars VT texture from John Van Vliet isn??t working.

I INSIST that Mars VT texture from John Van Vliet IS working.

Bye Fridger

[ajtribick]

I agree with Fridger and ElChristou here. The spam situation is getting quite ridiculous.

Seems like all discussion boards are vulnerable to this kind of thing: at the very least we need active members with administrator priveleges to get rid of the bot accounts.

I don't remember how the registration system works, but it might be an idea to require activation of the account through a link in the confirmation email (not entirely sure if that's already done).

Or move to a different domain name/IP address, so the spammers don't have us in the directory. Guess that would cause a huge number of side-effects though.

[rthorvald]

he just doesn't seem to want to do this sort of admin stuff himself, and doesn't seem to want to let anyone else do it either. So til he decides to sort something out, Selden is going to have to keep deleting the spammers

Given that the website's hosted on Chris' machine, I would think it's perfectly reasonable that he does not give admin privileges to anyone else

Well, these two things are incompatible: since Selden is the de facto administrator, he needs the tools to do the job. Because sooner or later, he will get bored and throw in the towel without. So either Chris must decide he wants an active forum here, or the spammers will ultimately force it away.

Note that the spambots are not the problem: since there are ways to keep them out that aren??t utilized, they are - i??m sorry to say - just a symptom of the Admin??s way of running the forum.

-rthorvald

[chris]

I'll try and zap some of these spammers myself, but we need something automated. A while ago I did enable image recognition registration confirmation, but obviously it's been broken. Some reading on the phpBB confirms this. There are mods available which use more difficult to crack image recognition schemes. I'll try to install one of these. If that fails, I'll try to disallow thread creation right after user registration. I don't know if phpBB supports this, however. It also makes it hard for someone who wants to create an account and post a bug report (though perhaps they could spend their wait time reading the FAQ )

--Chris

[Malenfant]

There's a slew of spammers on the memberlist - they're very easy to spot, just look for dodgy WWW links to porn or drugs or casinos or other stuff like that in their sigs or in their profiles. Once you find them, you can ban them - if anyone's got links like that in their profiles then they are certainly not legit posters.

[bdm]

If there is a simple captcha mod for phpBB, then Chris could install that and we should stop some of the spammers. However, we should not consider any captcha mod that does not use a variety of textures for the background and a variety of fonts for the text.

I have already commented on the weakness of phpBB's default captcha in another thread.

The link to pwntcha is particularly interesting, because the website claims that the captcha for phpBB can be broken 97% of the time.

[Malenfant]

There's a slew of spammers on the memberlist - they're very easy to spot, just look for dodgy WWW links to porn or drugs or casinos or other stuff like that in their sigs or in their profiles. Once you find them, you can ban them - if anyone's got links like that in their profiles then they are certainly not legit posters.

Holy crap... I just checked the memberlist, and listed it in order of most recently joined members. Of the 50 most recently joined members, 32 have websites, and ALL BUT ONE (i.e. 31 out of the 32) of those members who had www links listed are spammers (the exception being alanb98105, who is a legit user)! Their websites are links to porn, gambling, drugs, spyware and stuff that's way beyond the pale. NOBODY SHOULD CLICK ON ANY OF THESE LINKS - god knows what sort of spyware and virus crap is going to come down and infect your computer if you do.

This is utterly ridiculous. For the love of god, Chris - either take a proactive role in deleting these spammers or assign that role to someone else to do it - either way the current situation is only causing harm, and the longer it persists the worse it will be. It's gotten bad enough as it is.

[chris]

There's a slew of spammers on the memberlist - they're very easy to spot, just look for dodgy WWW links to porn or drugs or casinos or other stuff like that in their sigs or in their profiles. Once you find them, you can ban them - if anyone's got links like that in their profiles then they are certainly not legit posters.

The problem is that spambots can just register as a new user. Banning doesn't seem to help--the spam accounts never seem to get use more than once.

--Chris