Page 1 of 1
so much spam!
Posted: Mon Sep 25, 2006 3:54 pm
by $var
i have noticed that one of my sites is getting a LOT of spam.
it is the only one that is coded with PHP, and it uses forms on the site as well as lists admin@.
why all of a sudden has there been an increase of spam? it appears as spiders are getting in.
are there any basic measures that i can impliment going forward to hedge this?
thank you so much for reading.
Posted: Mon Sep 25, 2006 3:58 pm
by feyd
Various forms of captcha, enabling a good spam filter on your domain and/or email client.
Posted: Mon Sep 25, 2006 4:05 pm
by AKA Panama Jack
Not much you can do.
There are companies that hire people to search the web looking for any site that has forums or any type of input form like a contact form. It doesn't matter what the site is programmed in. All that matters is there are either forums or forms.
Once a site is found with forums and/or forms the URL is passed around to many individuals and companies. Once that happens you will be flooded. The hire people to flood the forums and forms with links in an effort to increase their hit ratio on search engines. There are literally thousands and thousands of forums out there that are not policed by anyone. Once they are found they become flooded with link messages.
They also put links in every field in their profile on the forum. When search engines scan the profiles they find all of those links.
I wrote a little mod for phpBB2 that will not show any profile information for a user until they meet certain criteria. Then their information automatically becomes visible. That foils that form of link farming. About the only way to stop the other is to have someone moderating the site and deleting the spam as soon as they find it. That's basically what we do in addition to banning the name and email address but that is kind of useless. They use free email services and get hundreds of accounts per person so they can spam all they like on the same sites.
Personally I think it would be one of the most boring jobs on earth to sit at your computer all day looking for forums to sign up on and leave spam. But hey I guess it is easy money.
Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 1:52 am
by matthijs
Indeed, annoying but once your site is out there, not much to do about it. I once saw this offer:
Good day, sirs! I from Russia, therefore excuse me for my English. Bulk e-mail spam. We have many email lists from all world. Sent 1 million email cost - 200$. The prices for mass dispatch on forums: 2)1000 forums - $35/1000 3)4000-6000 forums - $33/1000 4)7000-9000 forums - $31/1000 5)10000-13000 forums - $30/1000
As you see, big business. Well, meaning huge amounts. I guess that once your email address is on one of those lists and is sold on to some of these companies ...
I think it's also a common practice to just take a domain name and add info@ or webmaster@ before the name and sent emails to those.
What I always do is not publish the emailaddresses directly on the site, but replace the @ with an image. And use a contact form, which should have a strict validation routine. Hopefully you'll make it a bit harder for the bots to harvest your emailaddress and a bit more difficult to fill in the contact form. I presonally don't use captcha's, as they are inaccessible even to people with perfect vision.
And lastly, using Thunderbird as your emailprogram makes sure any spam is automaticly filtered out (yes, 99% succes rate for me, never false positives, am I lucky or what?).