fucking spam bots

[Bikerdude]

How is it we keep getting spammed with these bloody bots..? how the fuck are they even managing to register an account let alone get an post...?

[Sotha]

How is it we keep getting spammed with these bloody bots..? how the fuck are they even managing to register an account let alone get an post...?

 

Aye. It must be maddeningly frustrating to manually delete that shit which just keeps reappearing.

 

Strange thing really. the technology allows such bots to automatically register to the forums and spam us. The tech allows this but it does not allow automatic spam protection. If a new member posts the same reply to various threads in a row, autokick&ban plus all posts deleted.

[nbohr1more]

I recall an old email anti-spam solution (mailwasher?) had an option to bounce the spam back at the offending spammer without any user intervention. It was apparently a controversial option and bordered on illegal but it was ever so appealing to think of those bot servers getting DDOS'ed by return traffic from mailwasher users

 

Fucking spam-bots!

[greebo]

Aye. It must be maddeningly frustrating to manually delete that shit which just keeps reappearing.

You bet. It's getting really old really quick.

 

Strange thing really. the technology allows such bots to automatically register to the forums and spam us. The tech allows this but it does not allow automatic spam protection. If a new member posts the same reply to various threads in a row, autokick&ban plus all posts deleted.

There is an auto-ban feature activated. I just deleted 41 auto-banned accounts (which were created since yesterday afternoon) and those you see in the forums are the more intelligent ones that are slipping through. I have to delete about 5 accounts manually each day and it takes me a few minutes to do that (have to delete the posts as first step, and secondly the account, and the IPB admin pages are a bit slow).

[7upMan]

It's not necessarily all bots. I'm translating whitepapers for a security vendor, and according to one whitepaper the shadowy faces behind these spam floods are paying people - usually unemployed or from really poor countries - to post spam messages in forums. It might be a good idea to check where those accounts come from, if that's possible.

[Shadowhide]

Thank's for sharing

[Springheel]

They're posting the same message simultaneously in four different threads. I think that suggests bots.

 

I hope modetwo is making progress on that update he mentioned.

[stumpy]

when you trace the shadowy faces back to point of origin, its usually one place of origin, china.

 

well they're the people who own the sites that the ads send you too. regardless of the site being in europe, americas, oceanic, the owners of site usually have a china address.

Edited May 3, 2011 by stumpy

[ungoliant]

well it sure as hell can't be america, as I can't imagine anyone computer-literate enough to write spambots would be so utterly damned english-illiterate. bastards.

[7upMan]

Ukraine and the Baltic states are also supposed to be hubs of cybercriminals. However, I don't know if this applies to the situation in the forum. Still, it would be interesting to find out. Is it possible to ban any IPs from China?

[nbohr1more]

Sometimes I feel that spambots have better things to post than myself

 

I'm just waiting for the day when spammers start opening tickets in Tracker

Edited May 4, 2011 by nbohr1more

[demagogue]

ugh, I've never seen them this bad before.

 

I don't think it's very cool to completely ban certain countries, though. There should be security updates that can help; most forums aren't this bad.

[stumpy]

the only way to trace them back to the shadowy owner is the site admins email address, which seems to be a lot of the time on a server owned by the chinese government in shanghai, or beijing.

 

couldn't give the ip address of these servers that information isn't in the public domain, its blocked.

Edited May 4, 2011 by stumpy

[Fidcal]

The Spam Wars have begun...

[rich_is_bored]

There's an easy fix for spam but most folks would object to it. Accounts are purchased using a credit card during the registration process. Unfortunately it's not entirely compatible with a community in it's infancy where growth is a higher priority.

[Fidcal]

My idea is to set up a private quarantine forum. It should immediately solve the problem from a user point of view but I don't know if it is more or less work for admin.

 

• 
   
  
• All newcomers are only automatically given write access to the private quarantine forum.
  
• Forum users do not see this quarantine forum so overnight they never see spam again.
  
• A few non-admin volunteers monitor the quarantine forum.
  
• They ignore spam and only look for real newcomers.
  
• They would answer the new post either fully, partially, or with a standard paste, and repost it as a quote on the public forums, eg "sorry I don't know but check the newcomer public forum where I'm reposting your question."
  
• They report these to admin who gives them access to write to the public forums. This job might be done weekly if that is significantly easier. On average newcomers would only wait a few days for direct access but meanwhile they can get indirect access.
  
• Once a month, admin delete everyone in quarantine.
  
• A variant is create Quarantine2 and delete Quarantine1 and don't delete accounts. Next month create Q3 and so on. I don't know however the repercussions of excess users. Be nice if forum software had an option to delete all quarantine accounts. If all forums used this method presumably such spam would die out because the public never see any of it; just a tiny number of non-gullible volunteers who are never going to respond.
  

[Tels]

Much simpler is to add a silly question to the "signup" form, like "which color is water" and ignore anyone who does not answer "blue". That should take care of bots (and only leave manual spam, which is hopefully in the minority).

[Sotha]

Yeah a few simple questions would be probably alright. As long as they are such that real people can answer them.

[Melan]

Tels has it.

[Briareos H]

Yeah a similar question really has reduced the number of bots on a dedicated forum I host. I would advise against such an ambiguous question however, preferring a topic-related one such as "On which game is the gameplay of The Dark Mod based?" or something similar. And even then you'll get spam once in a while, proving that some spam accounts are human-registered.

[MoroseTroll]

Briareos H: Good idea about the CAPTCHA-like question during a registration!

[Fidcal]

Not difficult for software to answer set questions unless there are many and changed regularly.

 

Data:

target_url: darkmod

Q1_keywords: water, color

A1: blue

Q2_keywords: sum, 55,44

A2: 99

 

But if experience shows with other forums that currently it is effective then yes, go with it.

 

Eventually bots will be so smart there will be no way to tell the difference. They will extract meaning from forum threads and post sensible posts that cannot be told from a real human. After being accepted for a few weeks/months they can work in adverts much more subtly.

 

They will be phoning us all up 1000s every day having conversations that cannot be easily told apart from real humans. When everyone's phones are constantly ringing then perhaps the authorities will take it seriously and do something about it.

 

Quite frankly I don't think it is too far in the future for bots to ring up people and have short conversations that most unaware people will not realize. I have already answered the phone once and had a bot asking something like "Is this 1234 5678?" "yes" "Oh, can you hold the line a moment please?..." I was already asking "who is this?" then a human takes over. It was only then I realized the first voice was a recorded voice bot that could tell the difference between yes and no. Or maybe it didn't need to but was just getting anyone on the line.

[greebo]

I've added a required field to the registration page now: users need to enter two digits/numbers to proceed, let's see if this stops a few of the registration bots.

[Bikerdude]

[*]A few non-admin volunteers monitor the quarantine forum.

Should this be required, I am happy to do this etc.

[greebo]

No spammers since yesterday!