Surely it's been suggested before...

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
But wouldn't it be possible to get some sort of countermeasure in place to keep the spammers away? As fun as it is to see Ransac's hatred tally grow, I think it would be best to just stop the spammers from registering in the first place. It seems like we must have talked about this before, but I can't remember it and this forum needed a new thread anyway...
 
L

Limited

Guest
Most forums won't let you start new threads unless you've posted in some.. is this an effective countermeasure or does it cause the spammers to pollute our existing threads?
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Well, I activated a verification system, where an email is sent to the new user and they have to click on the link inside of it as a final registratuion step. I think that has actually weeded out a lot of potential spammers.

As the really determined ones post though, I keep track of their email addresses and ban the emaill address when it reaches five spammers.

I know it's kinda annoying, but it actually isn't that bad overall... it mostly seems to happen over the weekend - not a lot during the week. Between TomB and myself, we're keeping them (slowly) at bay.
 
D

DarthFerret

Guest
Believe it or not, some spammers, are actually people. They use real live people sometimes to at least get the spam engine through the door of message boards. I administrate a Forum board for my church, and am having problems with spammers myself. I have done everything short of having each prospective member be approved by me first. Because this is for my church, I can do this on that site, and probably will soon. Some people will always be able to get around the newest "spam" software. If you don't believe, try playing WOW (world of Warcraft) and see what I mean....
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Oh, I know some spammers are actually people. But I think without the verification system, we'd be getting three times as much spam as opposed to now (which is roughly a couple times a weekend). The Reply System for the front page has tons for spam in it 'cause it's not subject to verification (the mere submitting of a reply).

So yeah, Ransac's hate tally just has to rise...
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Spiderman said:
Well, I activated a verification system, where an email is sent to the new user and they have to click on the link inside of it as a final registratuion step. I think that has actually weeded out a lot of potential spammers.

As the really determined ones post though, I keep track of their email addresses and ban the email address when it reaches five spammers.

I know it's kinda annoying, but it actually isn't that bad overall... it mostly seems to happen over the weekend - not a lot during the week. Between TomB and myself, we're keeping them (slowly) at bay.
Yeah, it used to be worse for a while there. But why five? That seems like too many...

And yeah, we're obviously not going to be able to do anything to prevent the ones that are actually people, or half-human (cyborg spammers?). If it were a larger message board, we could do the thing where the first post of a new user has to be approved by a moderator, but seeing that we have a small forum and not a particularly pernicious spammer infestation, it's probably not called for.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Five just seemed like a nice round number...

Plus, the spam messages don't all come from the same email address at a time. I'd get one from one email one month, and then it might not show up again until a couple months later.

And there's actually some email addresses that valid users use, like our current new guy, Sodo-something or other. So I just have to wait and see if enough spammers sign up on an email eventually before I outright ban it.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Sodomonger? So there are spam accounts that were made using the same email address. That sounds odd...
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
It does seem odd, but I think a lot of email accounts are those offering for free, like Yahoo or our own cpa-mail.net and spammers just sign up for a throwaway account. But occasionally legit users sign up too.
 
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Nightstalkers

Guest
Some forums activate that image code thing where you type in the code... while others will try something a bit more complex.... like a script/bot that'll play whack-a-post to anything with a certain number of keywords/links in'em (seriously, who will have over 10 urls in their post?)
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Nightstalkers said:
Some forums activate that image code thing where you type in the code... while others will try something a bit more complex.... like a script/bot that'll play whack-a-post to anything with a certain number of keywords/links in'em (seriously, who will have over 10 urls in their post?)
Yeah, the image thing seems common, but it can get annoying on sites where you have to do it repeatedly. Sometimes the characters in the image are almost impossible to identify. It's sensible if new people have to do it to register, but other than that, it's unnecessary.

As for who would seriously have over 10 URL's in a post...

People who link to all the cards in a decklist? Even if they leave out basic lands, that's still at least six hyperlinks (24 basic lands, 36 other cards in four-ofs, no sideboard) and could easily reach a whole lot more (a highlander deck, for example).
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Oversoul: Sorry, I meant the general email address after the "@". Not the whole specific one.

So when a spammer posts, I do a search on the @address part and see who else might be registered. And usually, it's the same kind of names. So the delete key gets a little workout.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Oh. Plenty of spammers use hotmail, yahoo, etc. and it would be easy to find legit users with those as well. But I know a lot of spammers also use their own domains...
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Oh yeah, lots of the domains have weird suffixes, like .pl or .iz or whatever - probably overseas domains. Not the common .com, .net, .biz, etc.
 
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