Spam

[Miles]

I'm getting rid of 20-30 potential SPAMMERS a day now that our email filters are catching and 5-10 legitimate SPAMMERS a day that make it through...WTF is going on?

Why now that the holiday season is over...I'm really getting sick of this CRAP. The SPAMMERS are winning guys! They drove Blue Frog and a couple of other sites that were making a difference out of business with DDOS attacks on their sites, the courts won't do a damn thing, the Feds will only deal with SPAM if it involves child pornography or has high profile targets.

We're keeping it out of Bj3d for the most part, but you never know what posts to allow and what posts to bury. The recent flux of spammers are using the same email sites so they're pretty easy to catch, but I worry every time I delete a bunch of them that there may be one really legitimate future member in the group. I'm not frustrated, I'm mad as this takes a fair amount of time daily to maintain that could be going to much more useful purposes like writing reviews.

Thanks for listening, I got it out of my system. Any ideas are more than welcome as per usual!:icon_tiphat:

[s_gibson]

We have the same trouble at my site. The biggest problem is the spammers are using AOL, G-mail and Hotmail to sign up to forums and without banning them that is one method lost to detect them. I've been tempted to ban all AOLer and G-Mail e-mail accounts from being able to sign up to the forum. Not only would this eliminate about half the spammers, but most of the forum users that cause trouble with unwanted post are AOLers.

It is sad, more and more spammers are getting through our E-mail server also. We are still able to catch about 80% or better still, but it is a pain.

I'd say that capital punishment ought to be on the table when sentencing spammers.

[Raptorfury]

i signed up with hotmail and i am by far a spammer . plus i flat out refuse to use a pop 3 account for my email . again capital punishment may solve a lot of problems but it creats more as well as punish thos who are innocent .

[nam-ng]

How about forcing newly registered members to change the password in their profile before their fist post or something similar? Default new member profile can't post, customized member profile could.

Is that possible?

[Schwarz]

Well maybe you could get some more moderators?
I'm sure a few would be willing to help out :)
I think you are doing a great job but like you stated earlier it must take a lot of your time wich isn't too fun considering that you could do a lot more things instead of wasting your time with some losers like that...

[p0lish]

How about forcing newly registered members to change the password in their profile before their fist post or something similar? Default new member profile can't post, customized member profile could.

Is that possible?

I think that's brilliant. Spam bots wouldnt change their profiles. The question is - is it doable?

[liqnit]

How about forcing newly registered members to change the password in their profile before their fist post or something similar? Default new member profile can't post, customized member profile could.

Is that possible?
I saw something like it in other forums where part of the registration is to leave some fields empty (like date of birth & country) and you have to fill them after the confirmation email .

[DragonMaster]

I saw some places forcing you to enter your system specs IIRC. :mrgreen:

[vfrex]

^I like that idea. Required system specs.

[DragonMaster]

Plus it's much easier to help people that forget to put them.

[Kougar]

That's a great idea, to require them to manually fill in parts of their profile before they can post. Some spammers might adapt though, but likely only a couple I'd bet.

The only other option I see is restricting people to register with email addy's that are not free... but this will just annoy many newcomers and keep people away. Even the people that get an email address from their ISP often don't use it...

[s_gibson]

Make sure you ban all .ru .biz and .info e-mail accounts.

[mousiness]

i say accept sign-ups manually yourself, my unle does that on his forums and it works like a charm

EDIT: or you can force users to use their ISP emails to egt proof of their internet connection

[ManicMouse]

Don't get mad, get even :wink:

These spammers have to provide email addresses to register, right? Why not take those email addresses and fire a couple thousand emails at them :devildance:

I know you can't get them all, but I bet that half of these bogus registrations are being done by the same bots.

I may try that on my own board if I ever get that kind of garbage happening.

[p0lish]

So by your standards - they hit us we hit them? That does not really solve the problem and creates a problem for those who start spamming the pests.

[GrimReaper]

well yes Spam is really a big issue nowdays.. I am a regular at XS and I myself report atleast 2 spam posts everyday.. :@ they keep spamming and spamming..
I had a hard time registerting here.. my posts wouldnt show up that itself can make some new users uncomfortable and they might not feel welcome here.

one way you could control spam is to stop people from registering with FREE email ids.. I think guru3d has this policy.. But then again not everybody has access to a non free email ID and the spamers could easily get hold of other emails too :ahhhhh:

[Miles]

Blue Frog tried that same approach and they had their site shut down by repeated dos attacks and finally closed their doors. I'm really sick that our law enforcement agencies namely the FEDS don't do something, but alas they'd probably want to regulate the entire Internet then, so that probably isn't a great idea either.

I just can't believe these SOBs make money doing this. I can't believe that anyone is actually gullable enough to go to some of these sites they are advertising. I'm also reasonably sure that they have bots that pick up on SPAM conversations like this and they hit those sites reasonbly hard just because they can...I banned almost 100 SPAMMERS in the past two months and deleted over 200+ membership requests that were obvious SPAMMERS that were caught by our email filters.

Every time they take one of these bastards to court they get off on either first ammendment rights (Freedom of Speech) or some other technicality and I'm talking PORN SPAMMERS, not those trying to sell an IPOD through some cheesy site. That's what I meant earlier when I said the SPAMMERS are winning. The poor fruitcakes that end up on these sites and download from them get the book thrown at them for possession of pornographic files, not that I disagree. What I do disagree with is the people that run these sites and post this garbage on sites like this one get nothing but better healed financially while we struggle to make ends meet.

Ok enough of my soap box, Miles is leaving the building:jawdrop:

[vfrex]

Not true!

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,118493-page,1/article.html

[Miles]

Bravo Virginia! Unfortunately every state doesn't have a law that they enforce to this magnitude. I can show you 10 or more links where they were freed or the charges dropped before they ever went to court for every one you show me that was convicted. I wish other states would adopt this type of law and then enforce it once they have it!

[skootyloops]

I think forcing the pc specs to be put in is a good idea. And then get more information confirmed in a confirmation email.

It would hopefully decrease the amount of spammers.

[DragonMaster]

An other thing instead of the system specs, why not allow people to enter their signature and homepage links in the registration form, and then confirm the membership manually?

[skootyloops]

An other thing instead of the system specs, why not allow people to enter their signature and homepage links in the registration form, and then confirm the membership manually?
Yeah that would probably weed out a lot of spammers since they are not going to waste a good opportunity to try and spam members.