Spam

[Peter]

Well, check for the listed stuff and BAN / delete users.

[loki]

I really think we should do something about the amount of spam I've been seeing in the forum lately.
Weather it means moderators or more of them... or better account sign up authentication. Does it have a captcha when you sign up?

[ironcross]

I woke up this morning and what to see - almost all Windows section covered in spam + 1 - 2 spam posts in other sections. All cleaned

Edit: There is a huge spammers attack. Two pages with members deleted - all spammers and registered in the last few days.

Edit II: They still coming like a waves of zombies. Until now i deleted them, but they coming again, so i started ban them - maybe this will be a little more effective.

[Peter]

Just ban them. If they have some lame VPN or proxy, or a VPS, just ban the whole host.
Normal people won't connect from such people.

[ironcross]

Yes, i do full ban already - username, email, IP, hostname... all.

[Peter]

Good. If you want, you can edit the ban.
Like... originally:
48.213.193.221

And you edit it:
48.213.193.*

So you ban the whole "domain".

[Nemo]

Yes same, doing my best to delete and clean this spams which are more active lately somehow.

[Rastaman]

Well this is what happens when a program becomes popular, I guess that's something to be happy about

Instead of doing it manually it might be easier to install a SMF mod or something similar

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=544

[Peter]

Akismet, stopforumspam, and reCaptcha are installed and activated.
The bots are too ... ehm ... good? While the plugins keep a lot of bots out, still a huge number gets through.

[Peter]

Okay, the latest SFS plugin (that you, Ironcross sent me) is installed and actived.
The other plugin is on-hold, I'm waiting for our key, and then I'll activate the plugin.

Still ... it's kinda hard that how much money the 'normal people' have to invest in such projects, just to keep assholes out of their site.

[ironcross]

A month later:
20112 Spammers blocked up until today

[Nemo]

Not to re-open an inactive topic but I've deleted close to 10+ topics with spam today only. They are pretty active lately.

[Peter]

Hmm. I did upgrade the server today (to 12.10 from 12.04.1) but I don't think that could break anything like this.
But I'll keep an eye out. Thanks for the heads up.

[Avelon]

rahlobreach What a nice name for... Halo Reach? Guess it's a software that picks up well-known names from the internet and just alters it with one or two letters being put somewhere inbetween and uses permutation (anagram), too.

Well, they certainly do have some free-time to think about it. But don't we have a russian user in this forum? Is it really safe to pre-delete everything from russia?
As we have a captcha to register... maybe its possible to add a second one to lower the chances that their anti-captcha successfully breaks it.

[Peter]

The CAPTCHAs are solved by real human people. Sadly.
So basically we have those modules. They check if the registering or posting user's IP is in the SFS database. If it's there, we usually put them on hold, or just delete them altogether. (They can always get a new IP and come back ... if they are really not spammers.) But so far I only had one single mail from a person who couldn't register. That's not too bad I think.

Also, there is no perfect solution. But this half-solution is quite decent. Unless we get really flooded (e.g.: they literally destroy the whole forum), there is nothing to worry about.
One thing worries me though. No one develops a decent php forum nowadays. Except IPboard. But that costs a fortune. :/