I have done a massive scan of the CW userbase to detect spam accounts that have slipped by in the past, undetected. Many date back in Early 2015. There were some false positives (or at least, accounts that looked legit) that I re-approved afterwards, but anything suspicious (for example, e-mail addresses such as
[email protected] which don't match the account name) is now requiring approval. So if you notice that our total member count suddenly decreases by 140, then it's because Streetwalrus just cleared the spam account queue.
Well damn.
/me wipes the list. :P
Yeah, if you notice, all of those look likee the newer accounts >.<. I just checked the user list again now and it looks much cleaner, although there still seems to be some undetected suspicious accounts.
We should do that once or twice a year, but if you do it, make sure to check the flagged accounts afterward, to ensure you are not about to delete a legit account. (especially older accounts. Basically don't just delete anything where only the IP is flagged as spam, because most people use dynamic IP addresses)
Why might anyone make a spam account in the first place? It's not like it benefits anyone.
It's just robots that crawl the internet and register accounts on forums to try and post advertisement. It's nasty but there isn't really a way to prevent them.
And they can do it FAAAST. I remember on omnimaga a few years ago one came through. He posted 144 replies to a topic he created in less than a minute. In the end I think they had to remove like 500 posts o.o
Do you mean the bot that created almost 200 topics in less than 10 minutes while the admins were asleep freezing all activity because it made the site unusable ? :P
Wow. O.O That's bad. Well, I have a friend who's a ninja both on the computer and with his fancy, numerous weapons who could help with encryption.
And for some strange reason, when I try to view sites on Opera Mini Mobile, the best browser for my Nokia E63, sometimes it asks me to approve some sort of certificate thingy before I can view a topic or post a reply. What's up with that?
Old browser not supporting modern encryption properly, that's unrelated to spambots.
I've seen what spambots can do; One got into my mom's email and sent more than 50 asking for dates to different email accounts, all within the same minute!
So, where would my ninja go to sign up for this stuff?
It would be cool if everyone replied back to spam automatically, effectively DDoS'ing spam computers/servers :P
Eh. Spambot makers can do anything to inconvenience site admins if you have no protection in place effectively turning the whole site in ads in some cases, although StopForumSpam served us and Omnimaga well and blocked most of the spam.
Actually I think spambots mostly use forums to get better referencing on google considering how many links they post.
Yeah, site ranking is the main reason. By posting many spam links or putting spam links in their signatures on as many forums as possible, many search engines will rank the advertised site higher.
Same with any site, kinda. For example, if CW members put http://codewalr.us in their forum signatures or profile URL on other forums and sites they frequent, then CW search ranking will go up. But spamming will sometimes cause the opposite, because some search engines detect spam (eg if the linked site is completely irrelevant, such as a Casino/muscle growth link on a programming/gaming site).
Why not use a CAPCHA?
CAPTCHA is useless. Every single bot software is programmed to circumvent them. Recaptcha could work, but even then I bet that bots can get past it.
We just use Stop Forum Spam database, which runs a scan when a member signs up on CW.
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on February 16, 2016, 08:10:41 PM
CAPTCHA is useless. Every single bot software is programmed to circumvent them. Recaptcha could work, but even then I bet that bots can get past it.
We just use Stop Forum Spam database, which runs a scan when a member signs up on CW.
I heard that reCAPCHA gets updated every 2 weeks ;)
My main concern about Recaptcha though is when their server is down. On Omni we once used Recaptcha and had to get rid of it because everytime their server was down, nobody could register on the forums.
Make the answer to the verification thingy a word, eg. question would be "what's the coolest animal?" On 1bitforum, not a single bot has gotten through since we have that procedure in place, only some human spammers.
We try to keep our questions as simple as possible, though, so we had an hard time figuring out a good easy question that can't be misspelled easily.
Recaptcha is owned and hosted by google now, there shouldn't be any concern of it going down. :P
What if the NSA shuts down Google and Apple for refusing to decrypt their user info? :P
Then we'll all beg the world's richest man for mercy. :P
And what if himself or Microsoft/Linux distros suffers the same fate? :P
Then we'll all go back to the stone age, where all our phones had more buttons than your Xbox controller. :P
Street gave me permission to do another spambot purge. We went from 603 users to 471 in the process. 4 accounts among those 471 were approved, but require email activation, since they looked spammy, but had the same username as their email (which is sometimes an hint that it's legit). If they don't activate their account within next week or so then Street, aeTIos and Juju can probably delete them.
Awesome! Purge out all the Jedi Spammers
Why purging the Jedi's? D:
Also we blocked over 15K spammers so far (about 1400 slipped by and were flagged as spam or were detected later)
Quote from: alexgt on May 19, 2016, 01:36:03 PM
Awesome! Purge out all the Jedi Spammers
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on May 19, 2016, 01:37:28 PM
Why purging the Jedi's? D:
Because the force makes Iron Walrii look bad. :P
But Jedis aren't all that bad XD
Also when I deleted accounts I noticed that
@Streetwalrus forgot to remove one bot account that actually advertised on the forums last year, then the same bot logged in again months later to spam again, and was never banned. That's the most lax intervention I have ever seen on a forum against a spambot O.O
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on May 19, 2016, 01:37:28 PM
Why purging the Jedi's? D:
Also we blocked over 15K spammers so far (about 1400 slipped by and were flagged as spam or were detected later)
Because we are sith lords :trollface:
Quote from: Dudeman313 on May 21, 2016, 03:22:25 PM
Quote from: alexgt on May 19, 2016, 01:36:03 PM
Awesome! Purge out all the Jedi Spammers
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on May 19, 2016, 01:37:28 PM
Why purging the Jedi's? D:
Because the force makes Iron Walrii look bad. :P
Naw iron walrii shall always win!
I rejected another 68 members today as well. Such a pain.
I wish it wasn't split by pages. :P