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Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2012 7:23 pm
by BigEd
Sounds good to whisk this spam discussion off elsewhere - although I doubt the spammers would take the time to check any warning, to be honest - they are paid for each drive-by they do, and probably not much.

It might help ordinary non-spamming newbies to be warned not to look like a spammer though - and not to take offence if falsely accused. And perhaps it would save wear and tear if the post asked regulars to PM you when they see a spam post, but otherwise to leave it undisturbed. Then you have fewer posts to delete, and we get fewer false indications that a really interesting conversation just sparked up!

(It would be kind of interesting to know how many you delete - the care and attention is much appreciated.)

(If this discussion has attracted more spam than usual, it might because of the subject matter.)

Cheers
Ed

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2012 7:49 pm
by GARTHWILSON
Quote:
It would be kind of interesting to know how many you delete
It's one every few days now. At the peak a few years ago before there was the capcha in the sign-up process, it was about 20 a day!

Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2012 10:18 am
by BitWise
Can people post here without completing an email authorization?

One of the other forums I visit had hundreds of spam posters a day until they enabled email authorization, then it dropped to zero. This people/bots tend to use fake email addresses so they never get authorized to post. We just have to periodically erase the inactive accounts.

Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2012 10:29 am
by Tor
Unfortunately the spammers can handle email authorization now.

Authentication was enabled for a couple of wikis I frequent, and it didn't make any difference whatsoever, there were still tons of spam every day, it was a 24 hour job to keep it away (it happens that some sites for some reason gets known to the spammers and then it's endless spam, whatever you do). For one of the wikis the spam didn't stop until the administrator disabled account creation - to get an account you now have to email him and tell who you are.

"First post must be moderated" seems the simplest method to avoid spam. That, and a couple of things I mentioned in my earlier post.

-Tor

Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2012 5:37 pm
by GARTHWILSON
There were a couple of cases where we contacted the spammer's ISPs and the ISP actually cancelled their accounts. That's a lot of work though. Another ISP kept asking for more explanation of exactly what the offense was, even after we had made it very clear.

Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2012 10:30 pm
by ElEctric_EyE
Personally, I've noticed the spammer registrations are on the increase here on this forum for whatever reason.

IMO there needs to be multiple Moderators/Admin (West to East) to delete these ASAP.

I volunteer my services.

Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2012 10:39 pm
by Nightmaretony
nother west coast volunteer here.

Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2012 10:47 pm
by ElEctric_EyE
I thought you were "across the pond" meadowbrook? Wouldn't that make you further East than me?

Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2012 10:52 pm
by Nightmaretony
nope, am in southern california an hour away from Disneyland. Meadowbrook is a small unincorporated rural community.

http://www.savemeadowbrook.org/ I help out ehre sometimes. We got bigger cities after us :(

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2012 3:11 pm
by Dajgoro
I have a bit off-topic question which is kinda related to spam problems.
A friend of mine has a small web and game hosting businesses and i have some game servers there also, but lately he gets lots of attacks, mostly ddos. Now he said that there is a Cisco firewall named Pix, but there are more than one version of it, so he does not which is for him. Anyway the general question would be how to find out what kind of protection software is adequate for the hosting.
Also my and my friend wanted to have a website of our own, but it ended up being a hacker target, and instead of adding useful material, we ended up fixing security.

Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2012 2:00 am
by GARTHWILSON
Dajgoro, you can probably foil the attacks by using Linux instead of Windows; and most Linux is free. I will say again that our son runs websites on his own server with Linux and he can see the hacking attacks in the logs but they are all unsuccessful. Cisco is generally expensive stuff, and there's probably something just as good or better in the Ubuntu repository for free. Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution, and it's what I'm running here on my PC. I don't have any MS software.

Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2012 3:05 am
by Dajgoro
The problem is, that the hosting must be running Windows, because it hosts game servers which are made for Windows, the web hosting servers run on Linux. Anyway this is kinda a bit offtopic, where could i look for more help with this issue?

Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2012 4:08 pm
by Nightmaretony
The most famous web server lunux server is called Apache, look up about it.

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 4:30 pm
by Nightmaretony
Seriously, still happy with godaddy and fire ftp for firefox :D

and if it werent for having dynamic ips at home, I would see about tiny servers for my websites at home (1 main one and 7 for a wierd game project)

Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2012 6:03 am
by GARTHWILSON
Quote:
How 'bout this: I move these posts about spammers to a sticky, call it something like "What we do to spammers", and also publish the list of spammers we've kicked out, along with their email and IP addresses and what abuses they're guilty of! Actually the list would be far too long, but just showing the last moth's worth should be adequate to make them think twice before offending again. They'll find themselves banned here, but maybe other forums will pick up this tactic and make the price for spamming too high.
Ok, here's the last spammer who just posted, on this topic no less (and others), and I deleted his posts and kicked him out and banned him within just a few minutes of when he posted: (ab)user name: doldglarl email addr: dariosoon23@prokonto.pl IP addr: 188.138.116.162 If any one wants to make him extra sorry he posted his trash here, be my guest!