Is there some new spam software out there now?

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billvelek
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Is there some new spam software out there now?

Post by billvelek »

I can't believe anyone would take the time to repeatedly join a forum under a different name just to be able to post spam that everyone ignores anyway; it's so frequent that it's just about daily now, or at least that's what it SEEMS like. If that jerk (now "FreeVideos") is actually doing this manually, s/he is a real idiot. So far I'm not seeing much spam in other private forums, ... yet, ... so I hope this isn't a sign of new software that will increase this problem.

Cheers.

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warthog
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there are confuse-a-bot hacks out there

Post by warthog »

i run a board, and there are a lot of spam bots around. the way i reduced a lot of them was by adding a confuse-a-bot hack (there are many available from phpbb.com and phpbbhacks.com). the concept behind these is that they add oddball questions to the registration process. eg:"are you a bot?"; or they switch the order of questions around.

on the other hand, there are a lot of stupid spammers out there, that go through a lot to get their 0.002 cents per click.
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jeff
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Re: there are confuse-a-bot hacks out there

Post by jeff »

warthog wrote:on the other hand, there are a lot of stupid spammers out there, that go through a lot to get their 0.002 cents per click.
Especially since I wrote my own hack that disables bbcode for the first 48 hours after a member has joined. This makes all the links useless from the standpoint of a search engine indexing the site. It also makes it a lot less likely for others to use the links because they have to copy and paste them.

Overall, spam has been reduced quite a bit; but it sure is annoying. I delete 10 to 20 spam accounts every day.
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Re: there are confuse-a-bot hacks out there

Post by warthog »

jeff wrote: I delete 10 to 20 spam accounts every day.
ouch, i go in and clean about a dozen, once a week.

there are also a number of hacks that also prevent html and bbcode for x number of posts too.
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billvelek
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Thanks, Jeff

Post by billvelek »

Thanks, Jeff, and my post was not meant to be a reflection upon you or how you manage the board. I just found it rather odd that folks would go to such lengths to spam; just the type of people they are, I guess. They don't care about anyone but themselves. The REAL problem with spam is in my emails; on forums like this, I just ignore them, but with my mail I need to open them and then delete. Pain in the azz.

Cheers.

Bill Velek
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