Spam issue

I think they got hold of the information Tom is being away....bastards.

TiAm what seems weird to me is that this wave of spam isn't posting anything parseable by search engine spiders. What is currently popping up is a bunch of solely human-readable links that really have no effect other than getting maybe one in a thousand to venture out to the site of their own accord.

The other possibility is that this is a botnet set out to utterly destroy the reputation of a target website. Which, with such a pointlessly large amount, makes more sense to me than trying to get that one-in-a-thousand hit.

Also, the captcha breaker is probably the result of a website that sends captchas to users and pays them a few pennies for each correct answer. It has been done before.

we have a lot of spamers in the forum, and this afect a lot of the community.

here is a list of the spamers:

upsanddouwntsupe

fgfggfhgfh

folddemilso

maybe the admins can restrict the number of the post if the user doesnt have a lot of reputation.

Tom

Ashley

...the captcha breaker is probably the result of a website that sends captchas to users and pays them a few pennies for each correct answer. It has been done before.

Really? That's brilliant...in an evil genius sort of way.

Ashley

Seriously though, we need some sort of temporary restriction on new members making more than 1 new topic in a day. Or maybe a really low rep limit, like 150 or 200 rep.

This is getting bad, when it hits hard the forums become unreadable...and like you say, you and Tom can't always be awake.

Crowdsource it.

If a user has x amount of rep, or a badge, that person can flag any dubious first post, the suspected spammer and its post/s get sent to the corner.

The newb gets limited to a hidden forum, and mods give a thumbs down later.

newt that's actually very simple and great idea.

I think you gotta wait until tomorrow for things to be cleaned up again, since now it's outside office hours in the UK (guess even Ashley sleeps sometimes )...

Ban anyone who posts Korean characters on a new account ?

phpBB has the Newly Registered Usergoup for a reason - set the post limit to 1, turn post approval on. Each user will have to be manually approved, but that's 2 less ACP actions than it is currently and means the forum public will never see the spam.

I had my time with a muslim hacker always changing the homepage of my site. Was hard to kick him out. I was changingmy password and then kicked out, continuosly. Then i found all malicious files he put on my root and finally got rid of him/them

The final solution was to blacklist all those ip and install a firewall designed for Wordpress

Crowdsource it.

If a user has x amount of rep, or a badge, that person can flag any dubious first post, the suspected spammer and its post/s get sent to the corner.

The newb gets limited to a hidden forum, and mods give a thumbs down later.

That could backfire because rep can be gamed up reasonably high by a bot account (for example, the rep bonuses for views to profile), and if there are no post limits, and only low rep users can be 'crowd-modded', bots could very quickly escape 'rep hell' by gaming views/posting rapidly.

If this was done, the rep level req for users to ban posts would have to be very high (at least 5000, maybe 10,000) to curtail abuse.

I think it's a bad idea because if there is an exploit in the rep/badge system anywhere, spammers could start banning legit topics.

Elliott

This. Tom, where oh where are you...

now every is okay but i can say that spamers do it also begining at 5H00 AM

TiAm If you could only flag first posts it might work, but I sort of doubt it's worth the trouble to work out something as complicated it would be. The whole posting to get rep is a bad idea to begin with imo.

Dunno, maybe have a contest to make up a bunch of different Captchas using C2.

I've just realised Scirra gets 200+ regustrations a day, no way you'd want a team of 6(?) to deal with that.

Either stick with the NRU group permissions and let users with 1k+ posts approve/disapprove or use motionCaptcha.

Or ban Russia as an IP range, that's a depressingly effective tactic...

EDIT// Only just realised C2 could make a captcha - Newt just blew my mind. Haven't tested it but it'd be a bit bloated surely?

Maybe make it so the runtimes could be swapped, and used all the same resources.

A template... sorta.