More Spam Infiltration

[4rumid]

Just sent a note to support about this, but thought a technical person might spot it here first . . .

Now that spammers have been banished from the forums, they've made their way onto the Search Topics page. Half the "recent topics" list and the entire "popular topics" column, including heading, have been turned into links to a gambling website. Those topics are now underlined, so be careful about clicking on them -- they lead you to the gambling site, not the topic. What will they think of next

[jrichards]

Ah good catch... Thanks for pointing this out.

jrichards
Support
Constant-Content.com

[4rumid]

You're welcome. It looked like the problem was fixed right away. Are they back? Also, spammers were back in the forums last night . . .

[Celeste Stewart]

I'm afraid we'll never completely be rid of spammers. I've noticed that Sunday nights are busy spammer nights here. Sometimes I'm online while a spambot is spamming. It's definitely a bot because I'm fast but not THAT fast.

[ecdoran]

I'm afraid we'll never completely be rid of spammers. I've noticed that Sunday nights are busy spammer nights here. Sometimes I'm online while a spambot is spamming. It's definitely a bot because I'm fast but not THAT fast.

I wasn't sure what you guys were talking about until tonight. I couldn't sleep, thought I'd check C-C, and then BAM! Suddenly, the forum was filled with I-don't-even-know-what. It's weird.

[Celeste Stewart]

Good grief! The spammers are out in force today. I just looked at the logs and so far Ed, Debbi, and I have deleted over 400 spam messages today alone!

[Debbi]

*pant* *pant* *pant* Exhausting!

[Ed]

Thanks for your help! Spam patrol definitely requires group effort.

[BarryDavidson]

Do we ever ban IP addresses, or do they generate false ones for general domains?

Granted, they probably use proxies, but it never hurts to ask?

[Evelyn]

Same question as Barry, and I have an additional idea that I know you'll never let me do: Ban obviously fake users before they even post. Most of these fake posters wait about 2 weeks between signing up for the forum and spamming, then they're gone like raccoons in the night. The newly-signed-up-members-list contains a bunch of weird forum IDs that are similar to the ones we've been banning and battling.

Wouldn't it be great if we could ban them immediately? I know it shouldn't happen because legit users might get banned by an overzealous moderator (pointing at myself). I looked over the members list sorted by latest visit and learned there are 42 pages of forum members who have never visited again after signing up... a portion of them signed up and put pornographic or pill-pushing website names on their profiles and never came back. Grrrr.

Along those lines, can we delete member profiles, or does banning delete their profiles? The search engines probably index profile pages too, which means those websites in the profiles are backlinks, for whatever that's worth. Spam bots are all big twisted game but the search engines are NOT smarter than they are, despite complex algorithms.

My borderline OCD needs to create order out of chaos... I'll go back to mumbling quietly now.

[Debbi]

Evelyn, I hear you on the OCD front. I want efficiency and wail every time I have to click through several screens to eradicate these @#$%%ers. One thing I wish we could do is to search for a term like "Goods" and then delete everything on that page (or check them and delte) but I thin k only Admins can do that sort of thing, not lowly Moderators. Of course there seems to be quite a few levels of Mods so don't know if that's possible.

As for banning IPs, I read in the link support gave us to the software website that you can do it but it's pretty useless since spammers cycle through a large number of IPs as they post. I'm talknig about spambots here; it may be different for single users.

[BarryDavidson]

Speaking as an administrator of other forums in the past, it is possible to ban IP addresses in groups. Let's say that Spam-r-Us uses proxy addresses from 205-123-64-101 through 205-123-65-999 you can ban all addresses which fall between the two numbers.

Now where you run into trouble is when you have a large percentage of non-US members who live in countries which filter through proxy servers, or the spam program itself transmits IP addresses from prominent domains such as MSN, Google and Yahoo. I've run into both problems over the years. An admin then has to choose between users and spam blocking. Guess which one wins almost every time?

The checkbox idea is nice, but I'm not sure there is a mod written for it on this version of phpbb. A better alternative would be "Delete All Posts from This User" or the automatic removal of all posts by a user who is banned. I'll check around to see if there are any apps or mods for those options.

Judging from what I've seen in the logs, there are several moderators who literally delete hundreds of posts on a bad day - dozens on a good.

[Celeste Stewart]

BTW, deleting spam is a thankless job so: Thank you Debbi, Evelyn, and Barry (I see you're now zapping spammers too) for helping with this!

[Debbi]

Thank you Celeste for dealing with these spammers all these years!

Barry, I looked for ways to do just what you're sugggesting but didn't see any. I hope you can find a way for us to do delete all posts by this user or any other way to speed it up. Thanks for spending precious writing time looking into it

[jadedragon]

Customers very rarely use the board. Authors discuss customers here. Turning the Board into a members only can view would reduce spam and improve the functional use of the board for the authors and admin. Also there would be no reason for Google to index it which would mean we could post up paragraphs of ouor work without setting off the alarms.