mas spamadoras *sigh*

Anything R'n'D unrelated.

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RTADash
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mas spamadoras *sigh*

Post by RTADash »

Well, there's some more posts to delete...this time some of them are in spanish. :roll:

I'm sure Arno Weber would be mad if he got stuff like this.
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Post by Zomis »

They're all deleted now. I guess it was about 30-40 posts or so, so it took a couple of minutes.

Could it be that they've broken through the KittenAuth system?
flump
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Post by flump »

A shame really, for a moment this forum was.....interesting, and now its back to being dead. (at least the spammers post once in a while)
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RTADash
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Post by RTADash »

flump wrote:now its back to being dead
*plays funeral march*

I really hope Holger is alright, maybe he's gotten even busier. :shock:
zomis wrote:Could it be that they've broken through the KittenAuth system?
I think they may actually be human (well, as close as you can get while still being a spammer), because they deleted all the posts that I responded to before you cleaned it ... Wait! that gives me a good idea! What if I respond to all of them? Maybe a little self destruction action. :twisted:

BTW, I'm keeping a list of the names just in case they're real by any chance... do you think some sort of legal action may be possible?
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Post by Zomis »

RTADash wrote:I think they may actually be human (well, as close as you can get while still being a spammer), because they deleted all the posts that I responded to before you cleaned it ... Wait! that gives me a good idea! What if I respond to all of them? Maybe a little self destruction action. :twisted:

BTW, I'm keeping a list of the names just in case they're real by any chance... do you think some sort of legal action may be possible?
Did they delete the posts before I cleaned them? Are you really sure? I've just made my third cleaning in two days now.
It was funny to see your comments to some of the spam, but unfortunately they didn't removed it.

I truly doubt that the names they're registered with on this forum are their "real" names. Unfortunately, I've seen some posts on the internet about KittenAuth actually having being solved by bots.

And by the way, in my opinion this forum isn't dead, it's just sleeping a bit every now and then :) If you'd like it to be alive, then just post yourselves ;)
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RTADash
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Post by RTADash »

Zomis wrote:Did they delete the posts before I cleaned them? Are you really sure? I've just made my third cleaning in two days now.
Yep, I replied only to 2 of them originally and both of those threads were gone before you came on the scene.
Zomis wrote:It was funny to see your comments to some of the spam, but unfortunately they didn't removed it.
Spammers are lower than gravel on my living things hierarchy. :)
A lot of them stayed probably because the "users" hadn't gotten back on yet.
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Post by flump »

Well you have a few to reply to now! :-(

Zomis, can't you just delete their accounts? The last 8 people to join are all spammers.....or anybody called: "name_name_number"
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Post by Zomis »

flump wrote:Well you have a few to reply to now! :-(

Zomis, can't you just delete their accounts? The last 8 people to join are all spammers.....or anybody called: "name_name_number"
Yeah, there was so many recently so I felt that it was useless to just delete the posts.

I only have moderator access and not administrator access to this forum so I am unable to delete their accounts. I've sent a mail to Holger today and as far as I've seen, he've cleaned it up now.
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Holger
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Post by Holger »

> Could it be that they've broken through the KittenAuth system?

Technically possible, yes, but it would be less work to just register a few accounts manually, and then use these existing accounts to run a spam script with them.

> A shame really, for a moment this forum was.....interesting, and now its
> back to being dead. (at least the spammers post once in a while)

It's not dead, it just smells funny. ;-)

BTW: R'n'D 3.2.6 is already in the pipe, and there will hopefully be a pre-release soon that may attract some interest... ;-)

Until then, it's no problem to have the forum a bit quiet for a while... But those spammers should be removed as quickly as possible nevertheless, of course!

> I think they may actually be human

I think you're right (but I may be wrong)...

> I really hope Holger is alright, maybe he's gotten even busier.

I'm alright, and my little son, too! :-)

He just takes away some extra time, and I was busy using the few free hours to add some things to R'n'D, fix some bugs and prepare the upcoming 3.2.6.

> Unfortunately, I've seen some posts on the internet about KittenAuth
> actually having being solved by bots.

Really? That's interesting! (Especially as this is an unofficial phpBB modification that is really not wide-spread, I think, so it would be much work for less effort to circumvent it just for this forum (ot these few forums).)

Do you have some links about KIttenAuth being solved by bots? That would help fixing it for them!
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Post by RTADash »

Holger wrote:I'm alright, and my little son, too! :-)
That's always good to know! :D
Holger wrote:...prepare the upcoming 3.2.6.
That too!
Holger wrote:Do you have some links about KIttenAuth being solved by bots? That would help fixing it for them!
What if you do what a lot of "registration sites" do: require the registrar to copy a specific link from an email, or enter a code to activate their account. Those sites never seem to get spammers. It may be a bit inconvenient for users that are interminably eager to post [relevant non-spam content] right away, but it may be a bit more secure as it requires human response. (Or at least I think it does.) :?
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Post by Holger »

> What if you do what a lot of "registration sites" do: require the registrar to
> copy a specific link from an email, or enter a code to activate their account.

Yes, you're right, and I don't know why I haven't activated this option yet! :-o

Just did that -- let's see if it helps!

If we get the same amount of spam now (just deleted another few spam posts and users before activating the "account activation" option), it seems that these are really some crazy people that are manually spamming. In this case, I would have no idea what to do then (besides manually activating each new account, which would be the nasty last-resort solution)... :-/
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Post by RTADash »

Holger wrote:(besides manually activating each new account, which would be the nasty last-resort solution)... :-/
Unfortunately, it looks like you'll have to do this, afterall. :( Anything to keep the sub-protozoan lifeforms out can't be all that nasty. :twisted:
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Post by flump »

> I think they may actually be human

I think so too. A bot wouldn't miss out forums (like Puzzles or Off topic), it would just fill them all with crap.
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Post by Davacardo »

Hmm, it looks like they struck again. What the hell do they possibly stand to gain from it, and why do they do it? (Probably to provoke posts like mine to be honest)

They're online as I type. Could be Australian, or live in this time zone? Is this what you guys had to put up with while I was taking an unwanted break cause of my download limit?
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Post by Holger »

> A bot wouldn't miss out forums (like Puzzles or Off topic), it would just fill them all with crap.

Exactly. So it seems that manual activation of each new account is the only solution now. (Maybe we could change this back later again.)

Haven't activated this option yet, because I want to observe the situation for another few days. (But I've just written a shell script to quickly wipe out all posts for a given user -- no idea why this isn't part of phpBB's admin panel when deleting a user...)

> What the hell do they possibly stand to gain from it, and why do they do it?

Well, it's just spam -- some people might click their links and register to their porn site, and Google will spider all those links to their site in this forum and generate more traffic for them. That's how spam works (unfortunately).

We'll always have to try to be quicker and more clever than the spammers... :-/
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