Spamming attacks

[cheddatom]

Oh so it's you mods who are deleting all the porn? B*stards.

[Mrs Tinman]

Oh, I'm always lagging behind everyone else aren't I?

Could someone at least give me chance to look at these rude posts before they are deleted?

Sorry chaps. Sounds like a major flippin' headache, as if you lot running this place don't have enough to do already

[warwickhunt]

[quote name='Mrs Tinman' post='298738' date='Oct 3 2008, 05:00 PM']Oh, I'm always lagging behind everyone else aren't I?

[b]Could someone at least give me chance to look at these rude posts before they are deleted?[/b]

Sorry chaps. Sounds like a major flippin' headache, as if you lot running this place don't have enough to do already [/quote]

Don't worry Mrs T, they aren't those 'home videos' Mr Tinman made a while back

[Hamster]

By searching through - members - newest joiners, you can see the spammer / spambot is still creating accounts to get in. I wish I was better at computing type things because I want to launch a DOS attack at their IP! (or something like that )

[Mrs Tinman]

[quote name='warwickhunt' post='298739' date='Oct 3 2008, 05:02 PM']Don't worry Mrs T, they aren't those 'home videos' Mr Tinman made a while back [/quote]

I should hope not, they didn't really show your 'best side' did they?

[Mrs Tinman]

[quote name='Hamster' post='298745' date='Oct 3 2008, 05:08 PM']because I want to launch a DOS attack at their IP! (or something like that )[/quote]

Does your sniper training come in handy for that sort of thing?

[BigBeefChief]

[quote name='Mrs Tinman' post='298768' date='Oct 3 2008, 05:31 PM']they didn't really show your 'best side' did they? [/quote]

Best side? Inside more like!

[Hamster]

[quote name='Mrs Tinman' post='298770' date='Oct 3 2008, 05:31 PM']Does your sniper training come in handy for that sort of thing? [/quote]

Now I am quite good at balistically adjusting people's attitudes from a distance but I'm in civvy street now and not allowed to do that sort of thing anymore :ph34r:

[budget bassist]

[quote name='geilerbass' post='298279' date='Oct 3 2008, 08:41 AM']Damn the bastards!

Good work on stemming the flow guys - must be a real nightmare.

I don't think it would be unreasonable for authorities to publish the home addresses of known spammers on the internet, so that disgruntled recipients can go round their houses and cram the spammers' letter boxes full of pages from porn mags and flyers for viagra.[/quote]
What gets me is that they think we'll actually buy into it after them having attacked our forum.... yeah great

[BigRedX]

These spammers are even more deeply stupid than normal. Did they not check the subject of the forum first? We're bass players we don't need Viagra or porn, as we have nubile groupies at our beck and call!

[Lorne]

Just do what I do when Adminning the BC Rich Player's forum,any new account needs mine or the other Admin's autherisation,If I see the member's language is set to Albanian,then too bad,you ain't getting in,that's where 99% of the scumbags come from,also look out for any email addresses that have the same name as the intended member's user name,especially on Gmail

[ped]

I think that would mean a high workload to approve people all the time and lead to delays, too. Best to stop the feckers altogether - which is being sorted as we speak, I think!!

Cheers
ped

[Machines]

[url="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7653478.stm"]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7653478.stm[/url]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was linked to ours.

[escholl]

[quote name='Lorne' post='299694' date='Oct 5 2008, 12:44 AM']also look out for any email addresses that have the same name as the intended member's user name,especially on Gmail[/quote]

that would rule me out

[Kiwi]

There are certain patterns with the email addresses as well as the IP numbers. BTW the forum should be updated soon.

[Waldo]

I see the latest forum update has stopped the spamming attacks

Can you not add a verification code when you sign up for an account?

Edited October 7, 2008 by Waldo

[Kiwi]

The forum has been upgraded, I'm going to keep the Admin validation on new members for the rest of the day to see if the upgrade actually does the job its supposed to. The main change in the upgrade is a more sophisticated Captcha feature so hopefully that should answer your question Waldo?

[Waldo]

[quote name='Crazykiwi' post='301120' date='Oct 7 2008, 11:07 AM']The forum has been upgraded, I'm going to keep the Admin validation on new members for the rest of the day to see if the upgrade actually does the job its supposed to. The main change in the upgrade is a more sophisticated Captcha feature.[/quote]

Sounds like the best thing to do.

[Kiwi]

OKdoke, looks like the upgrade has staunched the flow of bogus accounts so I've removed Admin validation from user account signups. There's a chance that some accounts may have slipped through while we were still learning to recognise what was bogus. Hopefully though we've cleaned up most of the problem.

[Wayward-Wanderer]

Well if the spam attacks are coming from one or two specfic IPs, why not just IP ban them?
I'm not really good with computors, so i'm not sure that would work or if you can do that

[Kiwi]

That would work if everyone had a fixed IP address. However many ISP's provide dynamic IP addresses meaning a subscriber is assigned a new IP whenever they turn on their modem and connect. So for a number of members living in the same neighbourhood (such as Northampton) and connected to the same Internet Provider (such as NTL) banning on IP would potentially block any members who were assigned that IP address.

Obviously we don't want to block the IP addresses of members who haven't been involved in spamming but live in the same locality. Also it would be quite easy for a spammer to disconnect and reconnect in order to be assigned an IP that isn't blocked.

Besides which these particular spammers have routed through overseas servers so even if we did ban on the basis of IP number, the spammers could simply select another unbanned server through which to route their connection. I personally suspected the spammers were Russian in origin.

Anyway, no more problems since the forum was patched so hopefully this will be the end of it.

[Paul Cooke]

^^^ whut??? ^^^

[Kiwi]

Someone was spam link baiting and I've deleted all their posts. It's often being done by real people for internet marketing companies and its going to happen more as the forum gets higher rankings on google unfortunately.

[Gadge]

Having just read the topic [url="http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=60242"]"Can the idiot who's posting porn links be blocked?"[/url] I was wondering if you're aware of [url="http://botscout.com"]BotScout[/url]? I implemented it on a couple of my SMF forums a while ago and it's been very successful in reducing the incidence of unwanted bots — just thought I'd ask ...

[Machines]

Cheers Gadge - will see how easy this is to implement .