What to do if you see a spam message on EBTF

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What to do if you see a spam message on EBTF

Post by avij »

some people wrote:SPAM Alarm
If you see a message that is clearly spam, please follow these simple guidelines:

Do nothing.

It's faster for me to spot such spam messages if the last poster to that topic is a spammer. This method doesn't work if someone writes a message to that topic, pointing out that the above message is indeed spam. However, if the spam message doesn't get deleted within, say, 12 hours, feel free to PM either myself or the appropriate forum moderator for removal (please include a link to the message).

EDIT: If you're on IRC, feel free to drop me a note if you see a spam message.

EDIT 2, after installing phpBB v3: You can use the "Report this post" functionality when you spot spam messages, it's the exclamation picture in the message.
Last edited by avij on Fri Mar 03, 2006 10:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by avij »

I've now installed a modification to phpBB that asks guest for a confirmation code before they're allowed to post.
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Post by androl »

in the last weeks the spam has increased extremely. Are these spammers really entering the confirmation codes manually? Should we think about making it still harder to post anonymous messages?
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Post by Dakkus »

The confirmation code is always in the same font. It's not a very big deal saving each letter into a separate image file and then letting a program compare the code with its saved images.

I'd suggest alternating the used font, colours and disguise technics between, say, 15 different types.
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Post by Nomen Nescio »

The visual confirmation used by the forum isn't very difficult to overcome for those bot-writers out there.

There's one thing which would throw a nice, huge monkey wrench into their wheels, ie to switch from port 80 to 443.
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Post by Dakkus »

Nomen Nescio wrote:The visual confirmation used by the forum isn't very difficult to overcome for those bot-writers out there.

There's one thing which would throw a nice, huge monkey wrench into their wheels, ie to switch from port 80 to 443.
Why 443? That could cause problems to some people behind firewalls. But what about 21? That's usually open.
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Post by Rufes »

mabey, dont allow guest to post? or something
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Post by Nomen Nescio »

Dakkus wrote:
Nomen Nescio wrote:The visual confirmation used by the forum isn't very difficult to overcome for those bot-writers out there.

There's one thing which would throw a nice, huge monkey wrench into their wheels, ie to switch from port 80 to 443.
Why 443? That could cause problems to some people behind firewalls. But what about 21? That's usually open.
21 would be another option, but that probably would cause more firewall related problems, especially for people using EBT from work, depending on the local security policy, of course. A political problem, not a technical one :lol:
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Post by Nomen Nescio »

Rufes wrote:mabey, dont allow guest to post? or something
Won't help. the bots used currently have the ability to register bogus users and log in using this bogus user and posting on the forum.
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Post by androl »

if these are bots that post the spam messages, don't they always have the same IP? So could we make IP blocks?
I think wikipedia could have the same problems with automated spammers, and I guess their IP blocks work quite well
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Post by avij »

androl wrote:if these are bots that post the spam messages, don't they always have the same IP? So could we make IP blocks?
Generally speaking, no.
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Post by Dakkus »

androl wrote:if these are bots that post the spam messages, don't they always have the same IP? So could we make IP blocks?
I think wikipedia could have the same problems with automated spammers, and I guess their IP blocks work quite well
If I was a spambot admin, I would use random hijacked computers for spamming.
For those who don't know: A rather big amount of computers whose owners don't consider internet security important are being used also by hijackers.
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Post by androl »

okay, I see, 100 people on Wikipedia can handle 100 spam messages per day from 5 different IPs per day better than 3 people on a forum 3 spam messages per day from 3 different IPs :?
So we have to make the effort bigger for them
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Post by avij »

Comparing EBTForum with Wikipedia doesn't make that much sense, as the number of people who are able to remove spam from a Wikipedia page is essentially unlimited.
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Post by wisi »

the only think is that you might increase the number of moderators to speed up the deletion of the spam here. or at least give the rights to all mods at any part of the forum...
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