Pegasus Fleet Forums

We currently seem to be enjoying spam posts from across the planet. My own opinion is that ISPs who permit this sort of thing share the guilt. In some parts of the world, filing a protest to the webmasters is possibly a complete waste of time and effort. Perhaps banning those ISPs for a year or five might make a useful statement?

I found two sites which, between the two of them, usually give a good IP-range to ban.
http://www.whois.com/whois/
http://free-ip-address-lookup.com/lookup.php?

I like creating a moderator account in my forums named Gort. It's just... comforting.

- PSF

It's been quite a while since we've had any fresh spam accounts getting through to us - the two newest were created with a @007game.ru email address - for now I've blocked *@*.ru since that's where most of the previous spam accounts came from in the past (before we had blocked individual ones like *@mail.ru), but I'll be taking a quick look at our other anti-spam methods, since their effectiveness seems to have worn off a bit.

I'd already removed the two accounts by the time I saw this, but I'll keep your suggestion in mind for the blocking of ISPs. It's something I've stayed away from in the past just because there are possibilities that we could lose legitimate traffic from people on those providers by banning whole ranges of IPs, but if the problem becomes more widespread than it is for us right now, it's something I'll consider doing.

I've gone in and refreshed all of our new registration questions (they can get listed on sites and then that site used as a database for spam bot registrations) so that should help. I'm also going through all of the accounts signed up today, and setting them to force reactivation. That's the best way for now of removing accounts that could potentially be spam whilst not completely deleting those that may not be. Of course a few of them may be able to reactivate even as spam accounts (especially if they weren't set up by bots), but if they do I'll just have to deal with them if they actually do something.

In the meantime, I've set newly registered users not to be able to use the PM system until they've made a post. That should stop any spam accounts sitting quiet forum-wise, but spamming out PMs to people.

speaking of Spam. I recently deleted a lot of Spam posts the other day and blocked the user. I also noticed that the Forums are out of date and could use a version upgrade.

Yeah, the next forum upgrade is a major version, and I need to test it first to see if our skin works (otherwise the skin will have to be re-done), so that's been on the back burner a bit.

Can you let me know the details of any accounts you block for spam? Just blocking the account doesn't do much since they can sign up with a different username, so I need to try and match any patterns (in email addresses, IPs etc) and block them that way to make sure we aren't constantly having to react to spam posts.

I will get that to you some time over the next few days. I'm having trouble with my laptop connecting to the internet at the moment.