Death to Spammers, Phishers etc.

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Fri Feb 02, 2007 5:36 pm

Die Nederlands doesn't have a death penalty...but...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070202/ap_ ... s_spam_man

One can only cheer!

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Fri Feb 02, 2007 7:20 pm

http://eplaya.burningman.org/viewtopic. ... highlight=

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Fri Feb 02, 2007 7:52 pm

Holy Tap-dancin' Christ on a Tenspeed!

I'm not even going to bother with posting how many threads this one called "1" is flooding us with!

This is beyond spam! It's a fucking siege!!!

helitack · Post by **helitack** » Fri Feb 02, 2007 7:54 pm

Where is Larry Harvey when you need him?

ibdave · Post by **ibdave** » Fri Feb 02, 2007 8:09 pm

I sent our new friend "1" a PM. but in the subject I just call them a FUCKHEAD and a few other nice things.. They seem to leave right after I do that.. Not sure if it's working or not... But I feel better...

SED · Post by **SED** » Fri Feb 02, 2007 8:17 pm

Someone should threaten to ban him. That should do it.

Toolmaker · Post by **Toolmaker** » Sat Feb 03, 2007 3:02 am

ibdave wrote:I sent our new friend "1" a PM. but in the subject I just call them a FUCKHEAD and a few other nice things.. They seem to leave right after I do that.. Not sure if it's working or not... But I feel better...

Interesting.. I wonder if a PM will freeze up some of the scripts these jerks are using. I will try and PM one next time I see some new posts appearing. Maybe it has something to do with the popup to alert you to new messages. I only program machine tools so I don't know much about PHP.

Post by **AntiM** » Sat Feb 03, 2007 7:04 am

diane o'thirst wrote:Holy Tap-dancin' Christ on a Tenspeed!

I'm not even going to bother with posting how many threads this one called "1" is flooding us with!

This is beyond spam! It's a fucking siege!!!

17 posts, three by 4. I've seen worse.

SED · Post by **SED** » Sat Feb 03, 2007 8:08 am

I've beaten that.

Post by **AntiM** » Sat Feb 03, 2007 10:49 am

Yes. Yes, we know.

Bambi of Finland · Post by **Bambi of Finland** » Sat Feb 03, 2007 3:00 pm

emile_jensen just sitting for well ovr 24 hrs. pm'd me with a link I dare not try. Same with buttercups

ibdave · Post by **ibdave** » Sat Feb 03, 2007 6:59 pm

Bambi of Finland wrote:emile_jensen just sitting for well ovr 24 hrs. pm'd me with a link I dare not try. Same with buttercups

I sent emile a PM - in the header I flamed her about spaming and a few other not so nice words.. She wrote back telling me to cool my jets and be at peace with it.. well something like that.....

Archantael · Post by **Archantael** » Sat Feb 03, 2007 8:22 pm

Emile_Jensen appears to be ok....so far. For those who are afraid to click on her link that was in the PM she sent to a lot of people, here's a sampling of the links:

Scientific Evidence for Survival of Consciousness after Death
Library of Articles and Cases on Reincarnation
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation
Reincarnation News Archive
Reincarnation (Wikipedia)
Life Before Life
Afterlife 101

General Buddhism
Buddhist Meditation
Mindfulness In Plain English
Books, Discourses, Meditation, Essays
E-Sangha: Buddhism Forum
Theravada Buddhism

Meditation Instruction
Western Buddhist Teachings
Dhamma Audio : Ajahn Brahmavamso
Awareness, Acceptance, Understanding
Dharma talks by Buddhist teachers of various traditions

In short it appears we have The Fire Elf's female counterpart joining us and not some Russian sock master.

Toolmaker · Post by **Toolmaker** » Sat Feb 03, 2007 11:55 pm

Emile is still online after a couple days without looging out. I have also noticed that my machine is getting probed more than usual. I have been blocking these unsolicited incoming connections. I wonder if there is a newly found vulnerability in PHP thats allowing ppl to pick up IP addresses. I will start using proxies tomorrow and see if it happens again while proxied. I did look up a few of the originating IPs and 3 came up from San Francisco California, one from Russia, and 2 from China. Thanks to Evil for providing that trace link. Its much more informative than the previous site I was using. I highly recommend that you folks DO NOT CLICK LINKS! The only exception would be links from people you trust enough with your computer investment. I have yet to see a vile link from a regular eplayan. But that could always change with some of the regulars turning quite negative towards eplaya and its users.

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Sun Feb 04, 2007 12:20 am

I got a private message from Emile, too.
Deleted. No clicky linky.

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 2:31 am

Okay, this one is just...strange.

Mercedesroler. Can't paste the URL, that function's not working for some reason.

Location Poland, language Italian, title in English for something that's already history. Surreal.

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 2:05 pm

Poder4.

http://eplaya.burningman.org/profile.ph ... le&u=23091

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Wed Feb 07, 2007 6:59 pm

http://eplaya.burningman.org/profile.ph ... le&u=23137

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Wed Feb 07, 2007 7:19 pm

One possible way to address this...

We were getting hit with porn spambots over on the Pack site's board. Not as intensely as here, but it was getting fierce. Don't know how open the mods here would be to implement this, but we dealt with it by having site registration done by a moderator...in short, a human with human eyes that knows what to look for. No more e-mail verifications.

It's working. The admin and mods have sent three spammers to hell in the past hour.

robbidobbs · Post by **robbidobbs** » Fri Feb 09, 2007 5:55 pm

Abanmo8 looks like spam to me.

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Fri Feb 09, 2007 5:59 pm

http://eplaya.burningman.org/profile.ph ... le&u=23167

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 1:41 am

http://eplaya.burningman.org/profile.ph ... le&u=23189

Willy · Post by **Willy** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 9:13 am

Hi....new member, first post, yadda yadda. I enjoy burning man but have only visited by books or the web. My issue this morning however was the spam topic. I post elsewhere on a board such as this and have these same problems.

I'd recommend a few things;

1) Your defaults are set for anonymity when registering. That's good since many spammers just want the viable e-mail addies. You may be able to keep them private thru warning your members or in the admin area.

2) Since most spammers prefer to appear in the top forum you can set "notify" for the top forum. That way when a post is made there you can see it in your e-mail immediately. To safe guard this your mods can also either oick a forum or also have the trouble forums et on modify.

3) You can disable links if you so wish in admin. You can also disable other types of info transfer; flash etc. Your call on what level of protection for your members.

4) You can also either ban words or reserve words (XXX, viagra, finance)

5) It looks as if you use the Captcha visual recognition regisatration device; that's good. I'm familiar with a different registration format, but often we get unactivated members......then a few days later they activate.....and they a day later they may post spam. If you can delete them off.....screen some out....... it is less work to do so on the front end than after they do some posting. I often just delete them off but don't ban them. If they are real they need to get completely registered all in one sitting.

6) [b] Never[/b] click of the links they leave and warn your members not to. Mods and admins can "modify" a post to see what the hot link looks like....but really; who gives a shit. Just get rid of them. Don't endanger yourself or others. Also...... they probably also can see where they get "customers" from. The more hits they get from burning man the more spam posts you'll see.

7) You can often also get other good info on fighting these creeps at the home help forums; Yabb, SMF, V-bulletin etc.

8) I sometimes think that this spam threatens all of our boards. I wish that a list was just sent around so we could delete them off before they got around to our forum to spam. That's what I was search for when I googled and found this forum.

9) Oops, remembered another. You may be able to make your "profiles" invisible to newbies untill they progress to the next stage by producing decent posts. Since spammers will never hit the next plateau they will never be able to see other members profiles (and e-mail addies).

10 You may also be able to control (potential spam) PM's thru the same set of permissions applied to PM's as something allowed after a set number of posts.

best of luck to you all. I'll have to stop by and read sometime. I hope some of this may help you.

Willy

Willy · Post by **Willy** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 8:33 am

Hi. I have a few more suggestions about your spam problem. Are you banning e-mail providers? I can provide you with a list of what I have banned as well as some creative use of "wild cards" in banning people. For example;
[email protected] (lol....that looks like a viable site) becomes banned with *@*drugs* You can also ban providers with names that contain phentermine, viagra, porn, etc with the "wild card".

Banning IP's is problematic. Most spammers have dynamic IP's anyway or operate from hijacked computers so banning IP's is often a piecemeal solution.

We run our board off of SMF (simple machines) which we switched from Yabb about a year ago. We have relatively few problems but we are a much smaller target (only about 40K posts). I am a real "nazi" about getting rid of spam; kind of a "kill em all and let God sort it out" proactiveness.

In addition to banning e-mail providers like .ru or .gawab (and there are many others) I would suggest you "enable" 2 features I imagine that this board has but are not enabled; The 5 (the number is defined by an admin) last post topics and who posted them, ALSO you may also have enable "show recent posts" perhaps up to 10 pages with 10 posts per page with info on the post topic title, the member who posted it and the actual post. With these 2 features enabled your mods should be able to hunt down recent spam far easier and delete it, and smite the wrongdoer.

Also even if your mods don't have "global moderator" (like a light weight admin) they could still move an offending thread to an out of sight board. If your mods can't keep up you can also just add a few more. You have a big forum and you may be stretched too thin.

One other question is when your board was last updated? Yabb may have some new spam fighting mods built into a more recent version.

If there is anything I can do that may help let me know....

best wishes,
Willy

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 12:08 am

http://eplaya.burningman.org/profile.ph ... le&u=23294

At least we managed to get through the week without much...

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 12:10 am

...and the bitch he rode in on.

http://eplaya.burningman.org/profile.ph ... le&u=23293

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 12:12 am

A third? No posts yet but maybe we can nip it in the bud...

http://eplaya.burningman.org/profile.ph ... le&u=23295

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Fri Mar 02, 2007 8:06 pm

Abencebasup7.

Well, we had a week or two of peace...

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Thu Mar 08, 2007 12:01 am

pillsorder.

http://eplaya.burningman.org/profile.ph ... le&u=23568

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Thu Mar 08, 2007 6:10 pm

They're getting sly...the spammers figured out that weird names like Abencebup are flags so they're using commonly-utilized verbiage now...

"Rookie," http://eplaya.burningman.org/profile.ph ... le&u=23578

Death to Spammers, Phishers etc.

~