Spam

[Warren Demontague]

It's a combination of human involvement and spamming software. There's usually a human registering for the sites, but the spam software takes over afterward to hit the sites with posts.

Google loves sites with a lot of links pointing back to them, and rewards those sites with better rankings. The point of forum spam is not to advertise to us as forum members, and it's not even necessary for the posts to make any sense. The point is to post a ton of links all over the Internet so that Google increases the page rank of the sites that are being linked to in the spam.

So you have disreputable companies hiring disreputable people to spam their links and get a quick boost in Google ranks.

Sent from my BlackBerry Bold 9900 using Tapatalk

[nordwulf]

I added another spam database to the spam-o-matic settings and more keywords to filter in posts. Hopefully, that will catch more of them. I'll also change the random question when new users sign up.

Next step will be to put new users in newbie user group with very limited posting abilities in their first few posts on the forum (disallowing posting links etc.) but let's see if the recent changes will make an improvement.

I also found out the site that is used for this mod to check for known spammer IPs and email addresses has been experiencing some problems. If the mod can't link to the site, it will time out and forward the registrant to our registration system. They are working on fixing this.

Spam-O-Matic Tagged email - vhiphope462@gmail.com Unable to connect to StopForumSpam.com. This is probably due to some temporary problems on their website: Unable to check. User passed to vBulletin registration system per your settings at 'StopForumSpam:

Thanks to all moderators for keeping the site clean and fighting against these pesky, useless spammers!

[rpiereck]

Spamtastic!!!

[sab]

His links are still in his profile at top right of his post (location and my saabs)… might wanna delete that too or just do a redirect to an even dodgier site from his. Fuggin spammers!

[nordwulf]

I installed another modification to block the spam bots preventing them to register. They usually fill out the registration form very quickly (under 10 seconds) so those attempts are being blocked. A regular person takes much longer than 15 seconds to fill out the form and click register.

A few minutes after this mod was installed, the first one was already blocked.

A registration was prevented by bot blocker; visitor information below.

Time Difference: 2 second(s)

Username: xerisy879
Email: ahheekua@hotmail.com
IP: 125.77.145.206
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1

We're not the only forum that has been attacked by the spam bots with Vietnam IPs and email addresses. There usually is an attempt once every 10 minutes.

[Warren Demontague]

On November 16th, one of my forums received 99 spam registrations. Another got 78. I pretty much had to block all Southeast Asian IPs on one site. Took me quite a while to sift through it all. Since then I have received less than a handful, and I have seen zero spam posts.

My trick? I use something like this as a question & answer:
Use an online translator to provide the English translation of this Hebrew word: מסעדה

Answers:
restaurant
refectory
dining room
cafe
cafeteria
diner

That's definitely one that they need to take the time to look up, if their browsers/spam software can even display the Hebrew text. And it has not affected my legitimate user registrations.

[nordwulf]

I haven't seen any spam lately. Either the other moderators get to it before I see it or we won the fight so far.

[sjalks]

that is hands down the weirdest spam I've ever seen. And they made the subject SPAM? lol