SPAM posts

Post by **Holger** » Fri Jul 22, 2005 9:05 am

As you might have noticed, the R'n'D forum is more and more target to spammers, mainly from Russia. Nearly every day I have to delete one or two new "users" with zero posts, but with a SPAM URL as their "homepage". Just a few minutes ago, I deleted another user without a SPAM "homepage" (maybe they noticed that they get deleted right away then), but with a post that had exactly nothing to do with R'n'D, but contained just a SPAM URL.

I had already considered adding some logic to the forum registration process to require typing in some texts or numbers from an image only readable to human beings, but that only works against automated SPAM bots. But the R'n'D forum spammers obviously seem to be "manual spammers", which cannot be fought against with such methods. :-(

I try hard to delete SPAM users and SPAM posts as soon as they appear (and therefore -- hopefully -- before they get spidered by any search engine), but it's always a race against time. Especially, when I'm on vacation this autumn, I think I have to give enough administration rights to the forum moderators to delete forum posts and forum users. I really hate that we are forced to do such things. :-(

So, in general, if you find new forum users or forum posts which are *clearly* SPAM, and which are not removed within, say, one day, please don't hesitate to contact the forum administrators or moderators about it, so that they can do the appropriate steps to remove the SPAM.

If anybody should have any further ideas how to deal with SPAM in this forum -- be it technical or other --, please also let me know about. (But always be aware that these spammers are reading this thread right now, so you might prefer to use private mail for those ideas which should not be read by the spammers right away.)

Hate to write that all, but that's sad reality of Internet today... :-(

bojster · Post by **bojster** » Fri Jul 22, 2005 11:14 am

The only 'automated' way of blocking spammers would be using some blacklist (there's a list of most of them here, site is in Polish, but links under the Earth image lead to intl pages), but then we might have problems similar to these we had with powerboards... or maybe it'd be possible to manually blacklist certain IP ranges, if there's some schema visible... but I'm not sure if either of these can be done in phpBB.
So the best way to handle it is still manual maintenance of the forum (and for normal users - hoping that two people will manage that, while still devoting some time to programming/bugfixing/level creating/living ;-).

Zomis · Post by **Zomis** » Sat Jul 23, 2005 9:50 am

I believe someone mentioned that you could put up a quiz about RND on the registration page, I don't know if this is a good idea though, because there are also serious users who don't know much about RND coming to this page.

So, I guess the best way now is to use a text/number-picture input thing, and delete users manually.
Just make sure you set me and Flummi to be administrators if you need - and want to go with that option, since (unfortunately?) moderators can't delete users.