Eskimo North

I see spammers are hitting the BBS and posting stupid commercial ads int his forum.

Yeah, just did "yet another" run of account blitzing...

Still think it might be best to put new users on moderated. Seeing spam get through really diminishes the appeal of the forum. It makes things seem unattended and untenanted. Can't be good for morale.

You have to do the job anyway, it keeps the users from seeing it.

Be well,

Mike D.

On my bbs (http://www.cars101.com/forum) I have to approve all users and while it gets a bit tiresome, it cuts down on the spammers. They still register... mostly Nigerian phone scammers these days but they come and go in waves.

Joe

Joe Spitz

I have upgraded the software last night. The spammers were adding about one post an hour. They apparently were upset to discover the method they had been using no longer worked, so they launched a denial of service attack from a host in New York. When I blocked that, they then launched a distributed denial of service attack which severely overloaded the web server for the next several hours. Then around 4am when it had stopped and traffic was light, the machine hung for no apparent reason.

They had developed some method that allowed them to post without a verified account. What's more they could post from IPs that were banned. They still can create an account and post but hopefully that which allowed them to bypass verification is fixed so it should be so easy to automate the abuse.

We've only had one spam post since the software upgrade. The new software seems to do an excellent job of keeping the spam bots at bay. The one post we had, someone actually went through the trouble of creating an account, and validating it, before they could post. That's more effort than it's worth to them. I imagine it's just a matter of time until they improve their bots but let's all enjoy it while it lasts.

The latest upgrade I did has some added features to do just that if things come to that stage, as well as better catches at the registration level before that point. We'll see....

_________________
~ Eric -- "Metaphors be with you."
Sysadmin. n. A system administrator. "When something happens, drink as much as necessary."
(Mmm, tea...)