Someone getting ready to mass forum spam??

[Webdude?]

On my forums I am noticing a lot of new signups. However, they never post. For example, search the username "neabyzteplz" in Google. Something like 13,000 and all forum usernames, same with these other names. So I think someone is messing around, about to do a TON of massive spam on forums all across the internet all at once. Once you have a list of various usernames and passwords from forums all over, it would be easy enough to write scripts to go about this several ways.

Maybe this has already been noticed and some sort of counter-measure hack released... I dont know. The only thing I can think of that would prevent it is an image verification to submit posts. Anything like that already written?

[Phaedrus]

I believe that they are adds for the home pages that are listed for those "users"... They are like spambots but not quite. They are made to create the user with the home page and nothing else.

[Webdude?]

Nope, soon as I got your reply via email, I checked a number of them. No homepages in their profiles.

[Phaedrus]

Hmmm... They always had them in the other site that I used to be at before I created my own. I haven't had any of these yet...

[mambo9]

their onto my site as well,

lot of new 0 post users.

Some of the names have started to spam now, but a lot of the names are just idling.


Cant we do anything about theese rats?


Edit:

As a final crackdown on them we might use

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=109258

But i believe the dammage would already have been done

[Torqued]

I periodically will run usernames and emails of new registrations to my site through google. I've caught a few spammers that way.

The SpamBuster addon is great, BUT...

You still have to go in and clean up all the moderated SPAM messages.

What we *really* need is a way to stop messages from being posted at all if they have spam terms in them. I've been "archiving" most of the spam that I've been getting, and if we had a separate "censored words" list that would block the message from posting instead of just *'ing out the words, it would eliminate over 95% of the post spam that I'm getting.

As I get new spam, I add the obvious keywords that would not be used on my forums as well as the domain names to my censored words list. I'm finding that I'm getting fewer and fewer spam messages posted that don't have at least one of the censored words in the message. If only I could simply block those messages from being posted at all!!

I've made the above suggestion in the SpamBuster thread as well as over at vBulletin.com (here and here)

I think this type of functionality would really make a significant dent in both bot and person posted spam.

[tracylee]

I use an extreme measure because so many of our members were ignoring the rules altogether and causing trouble.

I have a phpESP survey set up as a quick 10-question quiz, also asking for registered username and password. The link and explanation go out on the user registration confirmation e-mail. The results of the quiz are the forwarded to 4 of us on the admin/super-mod team to review and approve or not. If approved, the user is moved to a group with posting permissions.

Yes, it takes more time, but we have a very active group of people who know what we allow and what we don't allow.

It's just too much work for most spammers to go through.

[Webdude?]

Well as I stated before, simply having a image verification to post a reply should be sufficient, right? I dont want to have to do that, but if someone builds that hack, I will probably add it.

[davidw]

This hack works pretty well - https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=96018
Most spammers I've seen hit a couple other forums I frequent never get to the posting part because of this hack. I even set the minimum down to 3 on one site and 5 on another and it works great. It allows legitimate posters the chance to prove themselves, but that's my opinion. Yes it does work on 3.6 (for those reading and wondering).

[ThatSnowGuy]

They are just starting to register on my site, and two of my friends sites as well. I am moderating all new members to stop them. Not that hard considering my site is industry specific. One of the problems we came across is that they are registering the same username twice, with the same e mail address, and registration IP address. We have our forums set to not allow multiple usernames, yet they some how get through that. Also, it took a few days, but they have all done the e mail validation. And one last thing, for some odd reason, they are all registering with the birthdate January, 1, 1980. None of them list a home page in their profile....

~Chuck