Forum spam

[Concillian]

Cleanup on aisle Diablo III forum. I banned him and reported one of the posts, but don't have permission to delete them all.

[swirly]

don't have permission to delete them all.

I apparently have deletion rights (I deleted a thread or two to test it). That probably comes from when I did the layout. Since it is not why I was given the rights I'm hesitant to go through and delete things. So mostly posting this for Bolty to tell me I may.

[swirly]

don't have permission to delete them all.

I apparently have deletion rights (I deleted a thread or two to test it). That probably comes from when I did the layout. Since it is not why I was given the rights I'm hesitant to go through and delete things. So mostly posting this for Bolty to tell me I may.

I asked and Bolty said I could delete them. So they should be gone now.

[Bolty]

I dig how this is a three-year old thread...

Anyhow, the war on spammers never ends. As time has gone by, they get increasingly coordinated in their methods, just as forum software keeps updating to fight the battle. If you've been monitoring the Lounge much lately, you've noticed a sharp uptick in spam as the previous methods to trap and fight them were failing to keep up.

There are several automatic checks in place here that mostly come into play when users activate. I won't get into much detail, but the server runs out to well-maintained spambot-fighting sites to compare every registration against known spammers, both from IP address and content patterns of their registrations (usernames, profile details, etc). The really good spammers randomize this stuff pretty well, so it's a neverending war to adapt to what they're doing. This is why 100% spam prevention is completely impossible.

"So just ban everyone registering from Russia or China," the naive poster may think. Not so fast. The good spammers all use botnets from infected machines worldwide, so IP address spamming is essentially useless.

As I was saying, most of the protection is on the registration side, and that's been a weakness lately. The latest spam attack we've been suffering from here is due to a botnet that registered hundreds of accounts over the span of a few days before their new registrations started getting filtered out from the spammer-detection algorithms. Problem is, by that point it's too late, and I've been in here multiple times a day banning and clearing out posts.

A few changes have been made today, and this may have affected a legitimate user or two around here.

1) Extra protection has been put into place on the spammer registration side to make it even more secure. Details will not be provided. Fun fact: if there was no spammer protection on registrations, there would be well over 100 spambot registrations per day and the forum would be useless.

2) User pruning is now heavily in force and is automated. This fights the spambots that register lots of accounts and then sit on them for weeks, sometimes even months, before using them to spam up a forum. Once you register, you have three days to activate the registration via email. Once you activate, you have one week to make a post or you're gone.

Today, over 4000 user accounts have been deleted, and I'm sure that there were some legitimate user accounts that were sacrificed. People who may have registered to read guild forums, especially - yet never posted - may have been knocked off. I do apologize for this, and hope they understand if they need to re-register (and post a "hi" post in their guild forum / public chat to stay a member).

The end result for the spammers is, if they do manage to get past anti-spammer registration rules, they have seven days to post their spam and get banned or their account gets auto-nuked. Chances are, attempting to register again at that point will get blocked because the anti-spam registration rules will be filtering them by then. Also, the member listing here gets a little less crazy because there won't be any spambots in the members lists older than a week.

Again, apologies to anyone who may have lost a legitimate account here today, but I'm sure they'll understand the necessity to keep this place clean.

[LochnarITB]

Anyhow, the war on spammers never ends.

And, once again Bolty, I thank you for this haven you have provided for so long. You and the moderators do a great job of providing us an online home.

[evianway123]

--removed spam--

[LochnarITB]

volvo servicing

And the shallow end of the gene pool award today goes to: evianway123!

"Oh, look, they gave me a place to post my forum spam."

[kandrathe]

volvo servicing

And the shallow end of the gene pool award today goes to: evianway123!

"Oh, look, they gave me a place to post my forum spam."

I just want a place where I can vote up your post Loch.

[Belix]

I've been clicking the 'report' button as I see these threads occur (and noting if more than one is immediately visible, rather than reporting them all), but I'm uncertain if the report function is sending any moderators a useful notification, or if it is unnecessary.

If it is helpful, does it work in a way where it is more helpful to report each offending thread individually? e.g. they show up somewhere they can all be deleted quickly instead of making the mod go hunt the rest down? Or is it less work/bothersome to receive just one report to alert to their presence? Just curious how I can best contribute, given the way the system may function on your end.

[Bolty]

Basically when you Report a post, it sends me (or the moderator of that forum) a PM. The PM includes the comment you include (if any), and a link to the offending post.

There's not much activity on the boards these days so it's not hard to notice the spam, making the Reports less useful than they would have been back in the day when their would be dozens of new threads here a day. But it's still helpful.

When I'm nuking threads, I do so per account. If one account creates 50 spam threads, Reporting them all serves no purpose. Just Report one and I'll be nuking all the spam that account posted when I ban the account.

[Belix]

Oh... that explains why my Total PM count seems to keep sneaking up by 1. I was beginning to fear I was losing a few marbles. "Wasn't it one less the other day?"

Alright, I'll keep doing what I've been doing then.

[kandrathe]

Thanks for the cleanup! I'm sure olabovaxo, resebtidv, towazhihe, vmomzugf, and friends will be back with new aliases in no time.