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Spam

Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 6:20 pm
by Syntac
What's with the recent influx of spambots? It's as though they're all targeting this forum.

Re: Spam

Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 11:59 pm
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.

Re: Spam

Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 2:54 am
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. :)

Re: Spam

Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2008 6:28 pm
by Eran
Spam situation is getting worse... super-mods to the rescue?

Re: Spam

Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 5:17 am
by JayBird
Just report an spam usign the report button, and we'll nuke ASAP

Re: Spam

Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 6:17 am
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!

Re: Spam

Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 10:14 am
by Eran
What about some spam filtering, like askimet?

Re: Spam

Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 2:29 pm
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.

Re: Spam

Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 2:33 pm
by Eran
Fortunately, it's been done before - http://www.eadz.co.nz/blog/article/phpbb-akismet.html

Re: Spam

Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 2:46 pm
by Syntac
I see. Administrators, what are you waiting for?? :D

Re: Spam

Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 3:06 pm
by VladSun
We have bot-like-humans here:
search.php?author_id=43668&sr=posts

Re: Spam

Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 3:45 pm
by Eran
Disappeared 8O

Re: Spam

Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 3:58 pm
by VladSun
These evil admins... ;)

Re: Spam

Posted: Thu Dec 25, 2008 3:49 pm
by Syntac
You guys are getting hit pretty hard. Increase the CAPTCHA difficulty, for heaven's sake!!

Re: Spam

Posted: Thu Dec 25, 2008 9:16 pm
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.