Spam Everywhere

[buzzzmeister]

As of today, I have made some changes on the back end regarding new registrations. Later, we will be deleting all registrations from .vn e-mail addresses (after checking to make sure no real accounts are in that group). Also, we will look at other foreign extensions like .ru, .pk, .in, etc. Usually these are spammers since LMF is visited mostly by people in North America (with shout outs to our European and Oceanic members!).

I would think and speaking from experience, you could blanket ban countries such as China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Iran, Kurdistan, etc. and also get rid of any and all accounts with IP's actually or by proxy originating from the same. I wouldn't think there's much demand for zero-turn information from some Pakistani, etc. living in a hut somewhere.

 

[Ric]

I would think and speaking from experience, you could blanket ban countries such as China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Iran, Kurdistan, etc. and also get rid of any and all accounts with IP's actually or by proxy originating from the same. I wouldn't think there's much demand for zero-turn information from some Pakistani, etc. living in a hut somewhere.

I just moved two spam post to the moderator messages to get them off the forum. What ever changes were made apparently aren't working well.

 

[buzzzmeister]

We've got about 3,000 accounts to remove in bulk... and then there are probably 2,000+ that we want to remove but in order to do so quickly, we need to make some customizations to the admin/mod features of the forum to enable quick and easy user banning/deletion. Right now it's a painstaking process to delete lots of users.

I have a plug-in on my vB3.8.x software that allows several options for bulk deletion. You can delete by a range of dates, by similar username, by similar/same email, by any variation of IP (whole IP or by octet) and a few others I've never used.

You should also configure to disallow duplicate accounts by the same email and by concurrent usernames. (smith1, smith2, etc.)

 

[buzzzmeister]

I just moved two spam post to the moderator messages to get them off the forum. What ever changes were made apparently aren't working well.

Temporary moderator approved sign-up or putting a new member's first, say 10 posts, in a moderator queue would be a good thing until any bugs are worked out.

Just looking at my StopForumSpam logs for the month of October and it shows 349,887 attempts to sign up on my forum so far this month by known spam accounts and I got *yawn* nothing that got through since early August.

And every single account that's made also gets a background check. Some days I get 5 new members, some days I get 50.

 

[Muhammad]

I just moved two spam post to the moderator messages to get them off the forum. What ever changes were made apparently aren't working well.

First step is to seal the borders. Then we'll deal with the spammers that are already in.

 

[djdicetn]

First step is to seal the borders. Then we'll deal with the spammers that are already in.

Sounds like the Border Patrol dealing with illegal immigrants:0)

 

[Ric]

Sounds like the Border Patrol dealing with illegal immigrants:0)

The thing about sealing the boarders is that it's something that can't be done. There will always be a way or they will find a way to get in.
If you delete the ones we have, shoot them down

the ones trying to cross the others will know that we wont tolerate them coming across the boarder. There is no 100% fix.

 

[Muhammad]

Yeah, it will never be 100% ... but we've only been at about 80% recently. So if we can get to 99% and only a few per month can get in then I'd be happy.

 

[Ric]

Yeah, it will never be 100% ... but we've only been at about 80% recently. So if we can get to 99% and only a few per month can get in then I'd be happy.

Yeah I know they'll never be a 100% fix and if your getting 80% you can consider yourself lucky but I'm at a loss. Your working on trying to seal the boarders as you say and that's great but we have five Administrators here on this forum and it seems to me if you put them to work deleting the spammers while your sealing the boarders between all of you, you could have the spammers deleted in a matter of days. The other thing is you appointed moderators and if they or we would have had access to do the job we were put here to do you wouldn't have the problem you have now.