We’ve been invaded,,
Plunked.
I really ought to get around to hooking stopforumspam.com up to the signup process, and automoderating anyone with a nonzero score.
You'd be surprised how much spam appears over on the lpgforum, its fairly quiet here by comparison from what i've seen. Though maybe it doesn't get seen as I get emails for new posts over there which might make it more noticable.
Nothing like as much here, probably 3 or 4 a week compared with that number per day, at least, on LPGForum. If I'm about I have both open on tabs and just refresh every so often so any that does appear gets dealt with within an hour so so. Brian obviously gets up earlier in the morning than me as I regularly find 3 or 4 on LPGForum that he's already dealt with when I check first thing.
At the moment yes very early mornings sometimes. 7am starts on site with a 1-2 hour drive means getting up at silly o'clock some days, The plugin seems to catch the majority of what appears though. Not sure why it doesn't catch those stupid trainer spam ones though, they always seem to slip through (and are completely irrelvent nonsense as well)
I probably see about five or six spammy signups a day, but mostly they wait for a week or two before posting if you leave 'em.
I created a group "Limited" that doesn't allow them to post but allows them to update their bio and message me, so that if someone is accidentally accused of being a spammer they've a chance to set things straight, but I've yet to see any of them do that.
Alot of the time you can tell from the name alone that its going to be a spammer too. Random nonsense characters on the end of another name like I've just booted off over there - Ruslanpgg, Ruslaneny, Ruslanitk all posted similar nonsense posts that got caught in the spam trap.
Just caught one, CurtisBop posted in Opening Time, I hid the post and banned him only to find that in the meantime, he'd posted the same garbage in Oily bits. So I hid that one too then deleted both. He was shown as online at the time so I wonder what he saw when he tried to post for a third time?
Another regular on here and LPGForum is a name followed by 3 letters, the first one being upper case, such as CurtisBop that I killed earlier.
Well done guys, I know you will always wipe them off when you see them,,
@Gordonjcp I assume that these sign ups are actually bots as opposed to real people or do you thine real people are taking the time and effort?
Both. In some countries, it's cheaper to hire real people than have a bot written.
I'd suspect its a bit of both - the signups are probabbly people, the posts more likely bots fed with the logins generated earlier. The waiting for a week seems fairly common as well, they rarely post straight after registration, probabbly to bypass some of the restrictions that some forums have on new posters.
phpBB (which LPG forum uses) is more commonly used software, so probabbly a more common target to be exploited by bots as well.
How the hell did CurtisBop re-register and post his same crap again?
What do the spammers get out of it ? Are they just being **holes and trying to just mess up a thread ?
Pierre3.
I think a lot of it is to try to drive their sites up the search results on Google etc more than to actually just mess up content. That said, some people are just asshats who would mess up a thread for the sake of it as well.
Most, like the 3 I banned this morning, start new threads that are in Russian, advertising for other sites or just plain garbage. It's very rare for a spammer to post in an existing thread. Due to the way the software for this site works, if I simply delete the thread, the main page shows no posts in that forum so I hide them, ban the poster, then go back and delete the post. There's been a couple recently that I've caught almost immediately they posted and are still shown as being logged in when I've banned them. I'm wondering what they see when they try to post another thread.....
Well thats easy to find out, create your own test account in another browser or on another device, and then replicate the process switching between the browsers. I'd imagine it says your not allowed to access this forum or not allowed to post as your banned?
I suppose that these are the prats that post links to porn sites and bit coin sites ? There must be a fair bit of administration in trying to keep spammers off the site and, for one, I applaud your work.
The only thing I know about stopping spam is in my email, where the option is provided to mark emails as spam and let the program automatically filter the spam out. But, of course, you have to do it to every email that you want to delete, and, as the spammers do, if the sender address is changed then you have to do it again.
It's a never-ending battle, unfortunately, and I wouldn't especially want to be responsible for the admin work. However, I certainly appreciate the guys that do.
Pierre3.