Whats with the influx of Bots/Spammers

Roark

Lord of Bacon
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Location
North Carolina
Pretty much the title says it all.

Noticed, fairly recently, that there has been 1 or 2 of these floating around the forums at any given time.
I've been reporting them when I see them, the echo posts are a dead giveaway.

So did something change with how you register for the site to let them through, or are people just getting craftier with them?
 
I think they are getting craftier... I have noticed them hit my website quiet a few times here recently, it's getting hard to keep spam bots at bay.
 
One thing we lost with the change of ownership was the country IP block list that we had got Larry to set up. I would update this country IP list monthly or so using a commercially obtained list, and had countries like China, Philippines, India, Russia, etc on it... the countries we have had the most spam from.

What that list did was to compare the IP of anyone trying to sign up here at TF. If their IP fell within those of the list then the "Register" button would be replaced with a message to email the admin in order to sign up.

Yeah... I miss having that.

EDIT: Hmmm... that post should not have even shown up. I had Janet add something to the auto-moderate list that should have flagged the post and kept it out of public view. I think I will have her add a little more to it.

EDIT2: NVM. It seems they got in enough posts to cross the moderation threshold before S0UL nailed them.
 
I agree in some of my forums they are showing up more and more. It is taking up more and more of my time getting rid of them! I had a similar system with the IP compare but I had some other things added to it as well. Such as the user name and the likelihood of it being from a specific country some russians for example might use a name from someone in history. My system flags these users in an orange name that only I and the other admins could see. However there was a drawback it took about 6 months to set up. Painful but helpful. :)
 
We still use a plugin that automatically moderates posts from new members that contain certain words that are usually used by spammers. It also moderates a lot of others, but we check those constantly and it only checks through so many posts.
 
That's the issue with technology it can't check everything but thanks I will look into it.

PS how do you get a blog on this forum? Or do you have to be a moderator or admin?
 
aww that sucks. But I guess there's a reason for it so if there's a reason then it has to be reasonable probably to stop a lot of spam ending up in member blogs or hate posts if you get my meaning.
 
aww that sucks. But I guess there's a reason for it so if there's a reason then it has to be reasonable probably to stop a lot of spam ending up in member blogs or hate posts if you get my meaning.

Yes, and yes.

The blogs came as a surprise with vB4 so we locked them down at first. We toyed with the ideo of opening them up to established members but really could not see any advantage in doing so as it would just be something else we would have to police.
 
Well at least I was right. Believe me I have had my fair share of hate messages in my VM's before. The forum was running Vb3 and I asked a mod to up my staus to mod for a few days to clean out all the hate I got. It was NUTS. But I cleaned it up and no more came. So for now I am content. I guess the guys causing the issues in the grepo forums got peed that I was elevated to mod status just to clean my Vm's. Because they complained to the admins! Anyway I gotta go more on that story next time seeya!
 
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