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Spam issues!

Posted: Wed 29 Nov, 2017 10:34 am
by ppgrainbow
I must apologise if this topic is in the Development forum but the General forum of PCem is getting hit pretty bad with a barrage of spam post at a rate of about two forum threads per minute with well over 1,500 forum threads of the same spam operated by a spambot since joining! :evil:

Something needs to be done to put a stop to the excessive spamming so that the Gemeral forum before the whole site crashes!

Thank you. :)

UPDATE: Checking the profiles, the spambot actually joined on 2017-11-23 at 18:54 PST and the spamming didn't occur until 17:11 PST yesterday. Again, something needs to be done to prevent this incident from happening! :(

Re: Spam issues!

Posted: Wed 29 Nov, 2017 10:38 am
by szadycbr
You right to post it here, cos no one will see it in other place, there is like 3 per minute, is this a person? did this? or some error/virus?

EDIT: so it is spam bot? who write such thing? how spambot was able to join the forum? :x

Re: Spam issues!

Posted: Wed 29 Nov, 2017 10:41 am
by ppgrainbow
szadycbr wrote:You right to post it here, cos no one will see it in other place, there is like 3 per minute, is this a person? did this? or some error/virus?
I personally believe that it's one of the persons who is operating a bot account, spamming out of control like crazy. At this rate with Sarah Walker only administrating this forum, it's hard to imagine how much damage has been done by the spammer.

Re: Spam issues!

Posted: Wed 29 Nov, 2017 10:45 am
by szadycbr
Hopefully there wont be more damage , than time Sarah must loose to delete 1500 or so posts for now, 1641 for now!! hrrr :evil:

Re: Spam issues!

Posted: Wed 29 Nov, 2017 12:19 pm
by SarahWalker
Thankfully I can delete the spammer and all their posts in one operation!

Sorry about this - I do approve all accounts to try to prevent this kind of thing, but clearly I've been a bit too lenient recently...

Re: Spam issues!

Posted: Wed 29 Nov, 2017 12:23 pm
by omarsis81
It was the most stupid spam I've seen in all my Internet ages! I mean, posting text in Korean in an English page with a web site, who in his right mind would enter? God!

Re: Spam issues!

Posted: Wed 29 Nov, 2017 1:14 pm
by ArtiomWin
It was the most stupid spam I've seen in all my Internet ages! I mean, posting text in Korean in an English page with a web site, who in his right mind would enter?
Yes, I'd to use Google Translate to read these messages. They were about online casinos. I wrote to admin earlier this morning about this issue.

Re: Spam issues!

Posted: Wed 29 Nov, 2017 6:15 pm
by SarahWalker
I've set a limit of 20 new topics per user per day - hopefully this means that if any spammers slip through the net it should be a bit less dramatic than it was today!

Re: Spam issues!

Posted: Wed 29 Nov, 2017 6:52 pm
by ppgrainbow
szadycbr wrote:Hopefully there wont be more damage , than time Sarah must loose to delete 1500 or so posts for now, 1641 for now!! hrrr :evil:
I sure hope not! The spamming finally stopped at 4:41 AM this morning! :)

Re: Spam issues!

Posted: Thu 30 Nov, 2017 2:14 am
by leilei
omarsis81 wrote: I mean, posting text in Korean in an English page with a web site, who in his right mind would enter? God!
It's all about flawed search engines that rank sites from a larger volume of keywords. SEO bots are not new or unusual, and every connected country in the world's got 'em...

Re: Spam issues!

Posted: Sat 02 Dec, 2017 10:26 pm
by gen_angry
SarahWalker wrote:I've set a limit of 20 new topics per user per day - hopefully this means that if any spammers slip through the net it should be a bit less dramatic than it was today!
Which version of phpbb are you running? I haven't looked recently but last I saw, phpbb 3.1 and 3.2 had a number of anti spam extensions that really do help.

You can find them here: https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/exte ... ti-spam-41 <-= if this becomes a larger issue down the line. I know around 3.0.6-3.1ish, they completely redid the CAPTCHA system to be much more robust (and with 3.1, allows support for other anti-spam countermeasures).

Another solution is to use a mandatory custom question and answer upon registration (maybe something related to PCem itself). Depending on your version, there's either an official way to do it in your user registration settings, or you can just use a 'custom profile field' with the hidden flag set on and a mandatory answer. Bots have a real hard time with these sort of questions but it does look a little 'sloppy'. It is however, low effort, quick enough to implement to stop a flood, and worked very well for me on the few boards that I ran.

If you have any questions, I can try to help. I do have some experience with phpbb :)

Re: Spam issues!

Posted: Sun 03 Dec, 2017 12:30 am
by leilei
one phpbb board i've been to combats spambots by renaming php files and correcting the links (i.e. potato.php)

Re: Spam issues!

Posted: Sun 03 Dec, 2017 3:20 am
by gen_angry
leilei wrote:one phpbb board i've been to combats spambots by renaming php files and correcting the links (i.e. potato.php)
Meh, I would advise against that just because it'd be a real hassle to update. Especially in the case of security hotfixes/patches.

Unless you've got a sys admin that really does not mind the extra work lol.