More spam related stuff...

[heyvern]

I am going to be getting very busy soon. I won't be gone completely but I may not be on the ball 24/7 to delete all the luscious processed meat products we love so much so I started looking at all the "banned" users. Hmm... a strange pattern emerges. Hopefully I can start blocking this crap before it comes in by blocking the email domains instead of just users.

This is a really brute force approach, but don't panic. The only domains I'm blocking are from known lists of offenders and also from evaluation of the morons signing up here only to tell us about those wonderful shoes you can buy on the internet .

If there are like 50 users all with the same email domain and they all are banned for spamming... then... hmm.... could I assume anyone using that address is going to be a spammer? I think so. These are not addresses like "gmail.com" or "aol.com" or anything that has a majority of legitimate users. I am only banning a domain if it is ENTIRELY spam from the users who use it and I can confirm this on other "anti-forum spam" sites.

Don't worry. I'm not giving away any secrets that "they" don't already know about. Just want to keep you guys informed.

This is once again, becoming like a "job" for me. It's annoying and time consuming. Anything to make it easier.

If there is a hell, there is a special place there for spammers. Unfortunately I don't believe in hell (even a spammer shouldn't spend eternity being punished... maybe half an eternity)... but I hope there is some sort of judgment at the end for them. Maybe they come back as toads or slugs... or one of those mice used to feed big snakes.

-vern

[GCharb]

Poor mices, sigh!

I used to run a few boards, spam was a big hassle, one of th reasons I stoped and went the blog way.

There are a few sites offering advices on getting or at least diminishing spam.

http://bbantispam.com/howto/
http://www.phpbb-security.com/
http://www.sumbit.com/phpbb_spam.htm

To site a few!

Hope you can find something there.

As for the spammer's hell, well, some could use a bit of punishment, like spending a weekend with my mother in law, hmmm, maybe hell aint so bad asfter all!!! (joke here, she's the nicest of woman)

GC

[Genete]

This is once again, becoming like a "job" for me. It's annoying and time consuming. Anything to make it easier.

Nolan and Rohel seems to still being alive. You should share your charge with them I think.

Maybe running a newest phpBB version would make your life easier. I'm one of the administrators or Synfig forum and I can delete posts that have been replied. I have to split the thread, delete the bad post and join the thread again.

Update this forum to a newest version should be done one day. The earlier the better.
-G

[heyvern]

Well, deleting posts is easy. It's stopping the little buggers from coming back. Mike gave me "advanced" moderator privileges. Probably not something you want too many people to have I would guess. I can delete and/or ban users or domains.

In the past deleting posts here was the only option I had. That was much worse because the same user would just keep posting because they would automate the posting process. Now I block the user but they sign up with another user account and a slightly different name. I've blocked what I assume to be the same "person" more than a dozen times with just very tiny slight variations in a few letters of the user name and email. That is when I decided it would be better to just block the domain since no one else on the forum used it except for spammers and it was listed on every anti spam forum site I could find.

It isn't nearly as bad as it was... but it's steady and regular. I think by blocking some of these domains it should cut it way down. I will give it a few days and see how it goes.

I'm not as concerned about all the work really... more about what happens if I can't be here all the time to catch it.

-vern

[gyula]

maybe modify the forum's script would help: type in a few digits of security code before you post your message.

[GCharb]

maybe modify the forum's script would help: type in a few digits of security code before you post your message.

These are called Captcha, you can find infos phpbb site by making a search for captcha

http://www.phpbb.com/search/?q=captcha

GC