Too Much Spam

[jamessolomon]

Has this forum not got a anti bot device to keep em out like a capatcha or something it seems since I was on here last night its been seriously infected with spam ands spam that may be inappropriate

[jamessolomon]

Super spam attacks need to stop its messing up the forums for the rest of us to use

[Joe_Rhimer]

Give the site gods a bit of time Having been attacked my spammers like this before on my own forums, the clean up and prevention assessment process can take a while.

[Williams]

We do have anti-spam bot measures (which you'll notice have worked well for quite some time), but there is no such thing as a 'fix-all' anti-spam option. No matter what measures you put in, sooner or later they'll find a away through and you'll have to add something else. Obviously last night they managed to get through what we already had in place... I'll be looking into what I can change to stop them again.

For the record though, captcha isn't very good anymore. Most spam bots are sophisticated enough to get past it; that's what we had on the wiki until I made a recent change that requires someone to answer a Trek-related question, and it did nothing.

[Joe_Rhimer]

yep, the image scanners on these spam bots is just about starfleet worthy anymore

[jamessolomon]

Anyone gonna clean up the mess these borg drones as im gonna call em did

[Alex]

I thought about deleting posts, but I'm not entirely sure how far my moderation permissions go. Besides, I know next to nothing about this sort of thing. I'll leave it to the webmasters. They may need to have an idea where the worst hit forums are. I'm going to leave removal to them, mostly so I don't get rid of something they need.

Of course, if they don't need those posts for any reason, and they tell me that, I would be happy to remove any I see.

[Confusedfire]

We should make registration similar to what we do for our wiki...Obsidian Fleet has it set up where you apply for an account via the IFS. That is what we should do, also deleting those posts before you remove the bots does nothing because they continue to attack until they are removed.

[jamessolomon]

It removes the borg threat from causing anymore damage to the forums

[Williams]

We should make registration similar to what we do for our wiki...Obsidian Fleet has it set up where you apply for an account via the IFS. That is what we should do, also deleting those posts before you remove the bots does nothing because they continue to attack until they are removed.

I believe that OF at least used to have their forum and IFS accounts linked because both sites shared the same database - it required some quite heavy modifications to be made to the forum to be able to accept the IFS-generated user accounts, and I believe that it at least used to compromise a fair few forum functions as well, but it's not the most clean solution, and it would also mean that any spam attacks on the IFS (which are monitored less, as most spambots who go there just create a user and don't actually apply to any sims so are completely harmless) would then also still spill over onto the forum.

What I've been doing as the posts crop up (before I activated admin authorisation for a few days) is deleting the user account and the posts in one; that alone doesn't really stop that particular bot from signing up again, but I've found it pretty much impossible to have a login form that spambots can beat and still keep any of them away through IP bans. Doing it this way through the Admin panel means as well that those bots that post multiple times can have all of their posts removed in one go.

The primary measure that we had on the forums before was a simple question-and-answer - what species was Worf, answer=Klingon. Those kind of things work well against automated bots, but what has obviously happened this time around is that bots with the ability to run a Google search or bots which have the answers fed to them by humans managed to get onto the site and get past this single question. I've replaced that question entirely and added about half a dozen others which are less likely to be as simple for a bot to find on a basic Google-search, which is the same process as we now have for our wiki (and which seems to be working very well there now; not a single spam-bot registration since that was put in place). The questions will at some point need to be recycled, to prevent the sort of answer farming that feeds some of the human-driven spambots, but it should serve us well for a while.