Spam

Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy.
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Syntac
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Spam

Post by Syntac »

What's with the recent influx of spambots? It's as though they're all targeting this forum.
Angie3641
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Re: Spam

Post by Angie3641 »

What does a spambot post look like? Cute signature, by the way. :)
Syntac wrote:What's with the recent influx of spambots? It's as though they're all targeting this forum.
alex.barylski
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Re: Spam

Post by alex.barylski »

What does a spambot post look like? Cute signature, by the way.
Ummmm...^^^^^^^ :P

I would swear with only two posts and a signature for backlinks you were spamming the forums. :)
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Eran
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Re: Spam

Post by Eran »

Spam situation is getting worse... super-mods to the rescue?
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JayBird
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Re: Spam

Post by JayBird »

Just report an spam usign the report button, and we'll nuke ASAP
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onion2k
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Re: Spam

Post by onion2k »

The stuff that's posted during "UK hours" is normally deleted by me, but I'm away at the moment so I've not been deleting any. It'll return to normal next week when I get back home. But then a few weeks after that it might get worse again because I'm off again. It's a rollercoaster ride!
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Eran
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Re: Spam

Post by Eran »

What about some spam filtering, like askimet?
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Syntac
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Re: Spam

Post by Syntac »

While it's true that this forum is full of experienced PHP coders, I don't think integrating Akismet is going to be easy.
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Eran
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Re: Spam

Post by Eran »

Fortunately, it's been done before - http://www.eadz.co.nz/blog/article/phpbb-akismet.html
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Syntac
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Re: Spam

Post by Syntac »

I see. Administrators, what are you waiting for?? :D
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VladSun
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Re: Spam

Post by VladSun »

We have bot-like-humans here:
search.php?author_id=43668&sr=posts
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't
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Eran
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Re: Spam

Post by Eran »

Disappeared 8O
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VladSun
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Re: Spam

Post by VladSun »

These evil admins... ;)
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't
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Syntac
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Re: Spam

Post by Syntac »

You guys are getting hit pretty hard. Increase the CAPTCHA difficulty, for heaven's sake!!
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volomike
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Re: Spam

Post by volomike »

I would reason to bet they have a script that works against a normal phpBB installation. It does this by looking at tags in the HTML, parsing, and then filling out the fields to get a registration ID, and then spamming.

Ding-ding-ding! I have a solution!

Just take the registration's password field tag, and change it up slightly. If that means changing the form posting page code a little to handle a new field name, then do so. See if that helps. If that doesn't help, then go the next step and change the forum message posting field tag.

For instance, if the password field on the registration form is named "password", then change it to like "psword". Of course, that breaks the application logic, so you have to see where the form posts and edit that form. Look for the $_POST['password'] line and change it to $_POST['psword'].

The only other opportunity is to switch the CAPTCHA logic out with something non-standard. In other words, change the registration's captcha so that it's not the one out of the box, because the spambots have figured out how to hack through that somehow -- probably through a long series of tests.
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