***Bot invasion on the forums***

[Twigsoffury]

So far i've spotted

http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/member.php?u=13850

and

http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/member.php?u=13849

and

http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/member.php?u=13935

[TheGreatSatan]

I've deleted and banned soooo many lately.

[Twigsoffury]

I've deleted and banned soooo many lately.

lol how are they making accounts?

[AmEv]

http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/showthread.php?p=342529#post342529

6 in an hour? New record lol.

[OvRiDe]

I'm not sure if they are actually bots or not. We have a double bot protection scheme in place so. Both a captcha style and and question and answer field. I have read that they might not be bots at all, but actual humans involved. I believe there are some companies that are paying people (in China and India primarily) 10 cents or so for each post they make.

[SXRguyinMA]

maybe set up some kind of new member needs approval until "X" number of posts setup? I see that on other forums a lot, where your first 10 posts or so need to be reviewed by a moderator before they get displayed

[AmEv]

Only problem is, they need people to moderate.


Is there a way in vBulletin where we can do the "force initial posts until approval"? That way, the spam (be there any) is caught in one area.

I think the concept of all post moderation is a bit annoying for both staffers and legit-ers, though. Do like the idea of no links or pix 'til some sort of approval.
Perhaps also carrying it out to some of the other info? (IM stuff, homepage)


Someone MAY have been able to poke around our configuration to make a page to auto-register themselves.

[luciusad2004]

I was just saying in one of the threads that was necro'ed by a spammer. They are getting really strange.

I saw one that was all in Asian fonts
One that was about Facial Care products (On a modding forum??? talk about poor product placement)
Then I just saw one that was all about Fractals with random links put in the paragraph

I would think if real humans were involved they could at least make it seem on-topic.

[OvRiDe]

Nah .. they don't care about on topic.. they are looking for clicks. Most of them probably just cut and paste so they can get as many posts as possible in a short amount of time.

[Cale_Hagan]

maybe set up some kind of new member needs approval until "X" number of posts setup? I see that on other forums a lot, where your first 10 posts or so need to be reviewed by a moderator before they get displayed
yeah, but that makes it rough, maybe the first post or 3? and have it go to a thread where anybody with 30+ posts can approve it? that way, they get their post in relatively quick, but to send it to the forum they want, without just mods having to approve it, more community based, and then they can get a welcome as well?

Only problem is, they need people to moderate.


Is there a way in vBulletin where we can do the "force initial posts until approval"? That way, the spam (be there any) is caught in one area.

I think the concept of all post moderation is a bit annoying for both staffers and legit-ers, though. Do like the idea of no links or pix 'til some sort of approval.
Perhaps also carrying it out to some of the other info? (IM stuff, homepage)


Someone MAY have been able to poke around our configuration to make a page to auto-register themselves.

i kinda agree, but with my said idea above, it relieves some of those issues. i do like the idea of no photos or links till at least 15 posts or so. =) :banana:
so if they are people, they have to jump through more hoops, effectively making more time for the botters, finding other easier sites to post on. so no more floods on ours. :banana:

[Drum Thumper]

Say what you want, those Ugg boots are nice.

[diluzio91]

I'm with SXR, I know mod approval is annoying to the mods, but i'm sure the spam banning is == to the amount of effort of enacting a 5 post mod approved before free posting is enabled.

[Twigsoffury]

Say what you want, those Ugg boots are nice.

lol yea!

[billygoat333]

Say what you want, those Ugg boots are nice.

Bahahaha

[Kayin]

There are places paying people to solve Captcha, and it's here in the US. Instituting a five-post moderated is a great idea, but that's a LOT of extra work. But, in the meantime, we're being bombed with SEO for other companies. Not sure how to fix it, but both sides look kinda bad.

[crenn]

Dangerous prototypes uses a simple system, no links in your sig, posts or profile website for 24 hours or until you make 1 post, or in our case, we can up that number.

[xr4man]

on one of the car forums i'm on, the administrator has made registering a hand picked affair.

or in other words, you register and then wait to get an email from the forum, then respond to that email, then the admin approves the account by hand.

that may be a bit more work than the admin here would want and also the other site is a private site.

[Outlaw]

for the bots though. With the links being posted, would they just get blocked from posting the entire post, or would the link be removed?

If the link is removed, at least that would help protect users/viewers but would still need staffers/members to report the spammer.

[Twigsoffury]

on one of the car forums i'm on, the administrator has made registering a hand picked affair.

or in other words, you register and then wait to get an email from the forum, then respond to that email, then the admin approves the account by hand.

that may be a bit more work than the admin here would want and also the other site is a private site.

That's always put me off from joining forums like that.


We ought to make the person answer a series of questions that a moderator asks before hand. No person just out to spam would take 10 minutes to answer questions to prove there intention on the forums.

[Kayin]

WOW. That was all in Polish. New one on me.

[x88x]

IDK, I rather like the idea of just collecting all the links in the SPAM posts and DDOSing their webservers. ...not that I would ever endorse that...because that would be illegal...yes... :whistler:

[simon275]

There are capthca sweat shops in India that fill them out aprrently.

Also I know people that have written software that read some capatcha using machine vision complicated stuff I don't begin to undsertand it.

[Fuganater]

I thought simon275 was spam....


THIS SPAM IS UBER ANNOYING!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHH!

Someone give me delete/ban authority!!!

[OvRiDe]

Someone give me delete/ban authority!!!

Negative Ghostrider..... The pattern is full.


I thought simon275 was spam....

LOL! Simon is one of our Alumni Staff and one of our oldest members. Maybe its a good thing you don't have delete/ban authority. DOH! :P

Honestly we have plenty of moderators that do a fine job at sniffing out and expunging the spam that gets posted. Its usually gone well within a few hours.

[Fuganater]

I thought he was before I saw his post count. I saw like 6 posts made by him and I didn't remember him.

[Airbozo]

IDK, I rather like the idea of just collecting all the links in the SPAM posts and DDOSing their webservers. ...not that I would ever endorse that...because that would be illegal...yes... :whistler:

Back in the olden days of the interwebs, this is exactly what a group of us did. In fact, several of us were using SCO Xenix systems setup only to feed them spam emails and they would then run a dos attack on the offending host. It was great being one of a handful of people connected to Mae West (the major west coast internet backbone) at the time.

[OvRiDe]

I thought he was before I saw his post count. I saw like 6 posts made by him and I didn't remember him.

It's true, the format of his name and his sig does fit the spammer profile. I just had to bust your hump a bit. :D

[Twigsoffury]

more bots in the "for sale" section.

[crenn]

LOL! Simon is one of our Alumni Staff and one of our oldest members.
I'm over a year older ;P

[AmEv]

NideSetcic, THANKS FOR REPORTING YOURSELF!
*cough*idiot*cough*getarealjob*cough*

[luciusad2004]

This is getting out of control ;-; I get so many email notifcations a day from spam posts.

[TheGreatSatan]

I just nailed one that had twenty posts before I banned him/it. Just don't subscribe to anything.

[Twigsoffury]

we must form some sort of solution to this problem.....

GATHER AROUND JUSTICE GEEK LEAGUE OF PRETTY ORDINARY POWERS!!!!

[altec]

A lot of sites are going to having it so the first couple posts have to be reviewed, them full posting is turned on. Just a thought.

I would just have a PM automatically sent upon joining to explain why the posts don't show up right away...

[Konrad]

Can't you guys maintain an IP banlist? Not 100% effective, but can't hurt.

[OvRiDe]

When we ban a spammer.. their IP address is added to the banlist.

[Konrad]

Well, I suppose it instills a heartwarming feeling of pride to know that TBCS is considered "prime real estate" for these idiot spammers. I participate on other forums (which I dare not mention in front of the botrunner, lol) which are more like ghost-towns.

I can only hope he/she/they eventually realize this site is not worth their time and effort because none of us is interested or stupid enough to buy into their crap.

[crenn]

Well, I suppose it instills a heartwarming feeling of pride to know that TBCS is considered "prime real estate" for these idiot spammers. I participate on other forums (which I dare not mention in front of the botrunner, lol) which are more like ghost-towns.

I can only hope he/she/they eventually realize this site is not worth their time and effort because none of us is interested or stupid enough to buy into their crap.

Hehehe.... even my s****y little website gets spammers signing up (just their accounts never get activated).

[x88x]

I can only hope he/she/they eventually realize this site is not worth their time and effort because none of us is interested or stupid enough to buy into their crap.
Hey, maybe I want to buy "super fun nike handbag". :whistler:

[BuzzKillington]

I've seen some forums where new user posts have to be approved before being cleared to post. Or would that add to the hassle?

[Konrad]

How about just preventing urls from being clickable until you've earned your custom title thing with posts/rep.

Nobody will ever visit a spamsite if they have to actually manually copy&paste the link text into their address bar. Traffic to the spammer site should be reduced to ~1 hit, only because the mods confirm before spamban. Consequently (one can hope) the spammer will move on to more lucrative sites rather than waste time here.

[AmEv]

Figure out how to either completely remove or un-parse random links/pix until X posts, then after the point, re-parse them for sanity's sake.

Make it so the pix in the modding section work, though.

[Airbozo]

I am checking into it now, but there is a site that lists the emails spammers use to register on forums with and there is a way to parse this info. If there was a way for forum software to parse this list before allowing registration, that would help. We could always just send out a ton of emails to the offending email account and flood their inbox....

[AmEv]

You did take a look at stopforumspam.com, right?

[TLHarrell]

Found another. Ban sameeoi3794 http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/member.php?u=14404

Three posts, all links to Air Jordan shoes.

[Omega]

How about just preventing urls from being clickable until you've earned your custom title thing with posts/rep.

Nobody will ever visit a spamsite if they have to actually manually copy&paste the link text into their address bar. Traffic to the spammer site should be reduced to ~1 hit, only because the mods confirm before spamban. Consequently (one can hope) the spammer will move on to more lucrative sites rather than waste time here.

I can tell you from my experience at least that we don't click or look at the links. Spambots are usually really easy to spot, big block paragraphs, links to irrelevant things, names with random assortments of letters, etc...

Besides, who knows what kind of nasty viruses could be on some of those sites. I certainly don't take my chances and I would imagine nobody else here would either.

[BuzzKillington]

Give out magical powers to a anti-spam squad that bans obvious spammers. If they have too many false positives, revoke magic powers.

[AmEv]

That'll look nice. A nice little icon can of spam above the Rep bar, to say we're an official spam fighter.

[TLHarrell]

Put a button at the bottom of a post of anybody with less than 25 posts to their name. People can then auto-report for banning with a simple click.

[Neodymium]

:eek: Bot invasion on bot invasion topic itself?