better spam tools?

[roylovelock]

yep i done very similar amount yesterday, its a joke atm that makes visiting this board a right chore

[Charbax]

Between monday and Friday I can spend 100% of my time getting the new design and forum upgrade done. I posted this thread about getting help for the forum design, if I can't get Hestia fixed for upgrade, then I might totally change the design to some different phpbb template: http://forum.archosfans.com/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=49956

[Charbax]

I'll spend monday till friday to fix the phpbb template and upgrade, or else pick another design and go with that, at least until I get the current template fixed. You can PM me on Google Talk charbax@gmail.com if you want me to do the manual editing of batches of posts by same massive spamming user.

[viking]

I changed flood interval from 10 seconds to 30 seconds.

It appears to be driving most mass spammers away - we were probably famous to them as an easy dumping ground. If more come back, it might be worth upping it by a few seconds because it seems to get their notice.

Might be worth upping the flood interval a bit. I have recently caught spammers in the act of multi hour series of postings. Was kind of fun to kill a nearly 200 post set while the guy was in the act of doing it, but maybe a few more seconds more will prevent it in the first place.

[viking]

We seemed to have a massive spam attack over the last 18 or so hours - surely dwarfing the number of valid posts. It can be just exhausting to kill off the posts due to the number of clicks needed for each spammer. I wonder if we can go back to the theory that most spammer IP's are fake, and not ban them? At least try it for a while to see if the spam doesn't go up?

Banning IP's doesn't seem to block the same ads coming back day after day. We may be killing some IP's that valid posters want to use, who then just give up on the forum. We do seem to be impacting the email and username if you can go by the weird lengthy choices spammers are resorting to. It would save 4 clicks of banning IP (selectx2, execute, return).

Some more clicks could be saved if charbax has access to the template for the "administrate user" tool. All the defaults have to be overridden for each spam kill. For the last two tick boxes (I forget what they are called) switch the order to "ban email" coming first as a default. Then be brave on the last tickbox and have "delete all posts" as the default. That would save 4 clicks per spammer.

[Charbax]

I'll try to install a default phpbb template and activate better registration on it, even if the designs doesn't fit and doesn't look like we're used to. I just have to do it before the 20th of February, that's when I travel to yet another bunch of conferences for over 3 weeks. Keep reminding me, evt yell at me to my email and Google Talk charbax@gmail.com to make sure I spend at least 24 hours of constant work before February 20th to get it done.

[roylovelock]

any move on with this nick?
roy

[viking]

Well, we are getting avalanched so I resumed banning IPs also.

Another forum had success with banning registrations with numbers or the string "xyz" in the user name or possibly in the email. If we have these filters available, I propose hitting on these red flags which we see because the bad guys use them to make multiple identities after banning:

-No registration of user names longer than 8 characters
-No registration with email names with periods

[roylovelock]

Well, we are getting avalanched so I resumed banning IPs also.

Another forum had success with banning registrations with numbers or the string "xyz" in the user name or possibly in the email. If we have these filters available, I propose hitting on these red flags which we see because the bad guys use them to make multiple identities after banning:

-No registration of user names longer than 8 characters
-No registration with email names with periods

so i wouldnt be able to join then??
i think a better idea is to UPDATE the board, come on charbax were getting hammered constantly now.
Ive not stopped banniing both ips and emails - ive also tryed to be more proactive and getting them before they post - but that can be frustrating as well when you get 30 sign ups and only 1 or 2 legit accounts.

[viking]

I guess a username restriction is too easy to adapt to anyway, but we get a lot of spammer email names like a.b.c.d.e

Maybe we could ban @ or http in the text. Somehow such simple steps vastly cut the spam in another forum

[Kodiak]

I've always believed that most spammers are just "of the moment". They do not plan long term. They open their account and get their 40 free email addresses, and now they begin to spam. They have no intention of opening web site accounts and then checking out the site, then coming back in a week or two to spam. They do it right now and move on and that email address and name mean nothing to them. In turn banning the email address is almost useless too because they will get 40 new ones tomorrow.

Spammers come to a site, register with thier throw away addresses, and do one thing and one thing only, spam a link or links to some shit they sell.

Until addressing the ability to post links right out of the gate, this spamming will continue. If I can register an account and immediately post 15 links to Ugg boots, football jerseys, porn etc. and do this without any problem, then as a spammer I have done my job. Until some criteria in length of time a member must be here before they can post links is put in, the spammers know they have a "hot" site here.

If you could not post any links until you are a member for 7 days, and better yet be a member for 7 days and have at least 4 or 5 posts, that will be one of the best ways to address spammers. Spammers aren't looking to register, post 5 posts without links, then wait a week and come back to post thier spam, that is just to much work for the spammer. Also if they post 4 or 5 posts of "Thanks for the info" or "Big help thanks for posting" one of the mods will have seen him and deleted the posts and probably the account. Then the spammer needs to start over, and again this is just to much work to post my spam links.

I do not know if this is even possible but until something like this can be done humans will continue to come here and register, post their spam, and leave not caring whether the account, and the spam posts, get deleted or even banned. They dont care they will have all new crap tomorrow and do it all again.

[roylovelock]

maybe that could be a quick fix, stop all newbys under say 20 posts linking would make it a complete waste of time posting on here, and maybe they will go away and post thier shit elsewhere - i still think that mod approval is the only sure fire way of stopping this though, i have no objections in moderating the first 10 posts people post before they can post freely, it would also bring things like problems to our attention more quickly as most problems seems to occur with newbys,
we really need the update though, they have found a floor in the board and are exploiting it to the extreme now.
im pestering nicholas now and i think we all need to before he jet sets to another show.
roy

[viking]

Since this forum software has proved so difficult for charbax to tame in "ideal" ways, I was thinking of tweaks for controls that DO work. Like the time between posts - increasing that helped, although it may have reached a limit of bothering valid users. When plan A fails over and over, how about more focus on plan B. What controls work easily and how can we set them better?