TAoM Invasion of the Spambots

[BBP]

Haven't heard from Michael unfortunately...

I'll be out of town this weekend. Hopefully I'll have the time to drop over and chuck out some stuff.

[BBP]

Checked in just before going to bed and ended up deleting over a hundred topics. I hope there won't be any other legitimate topics in the bunch.

Haven't heard back from Michael. He hasn't been on the forum since October.

[Elrond]

Thanks. It was bad this afternoon.

[BBP]

Spambots are pretty vile. Some of them have went past the stage of poor grammar and post a coherent line as a reaction to a topic.Later this post is altered to contain malicious links.

This often happens to topics that are years old. A good example was the kitchen remodeling topic, which was revived by one spamming user. Since it's not always easy to tell in advance if they are bots (or even a spamming human), I had locked this post to insure it couldn't be altered later to contain something evil.

But there's another way around it - and that's the signature that will appear on the bottom of every post. I can't remove that since that's an admin function only. Nor can I delete the user.

So I just deleted several newer posts to topics that I suspected were spam - at least there were links that were unsafe.

[Elrond]

I have a feeling the days of TAoM forums are numbered.... trying to go back and save the threads I care about.

[Jonathan Green]

How about this?
http://www.ninjapost.com/blog/9-best-pr ... orum-spam/

[BBP]

Only if Michael pulls the plug, of course.
If you find old threads missing, from before last September when I started doing this, it's probably the move to PHPBB that caused it going missing.

Jonathan - nice find but since I'm a mod and the only admin is Michael, it's not applicable. Except for the banning and IP banning, but unfortunately the banning hasn't properly been implemented in PHPBB interface.

[BBP]

Went to bed - everything okay. Woke up to find a spammer had added a new post to some 50 topics.
Banned his butt and chucked them all out, but unfortunately that has to happen manually. Took half an hour.

[BBP]

We've all received a letter (and you had a letter, and you had a letter, and you had a letter...) from a spammer in our PM inbox.

Please DO NOT CLICK THE LINK AND THROW IT AWAY IMMEDIATELY!

[Elrond]

Thank you!!! They're getting nastier.

[BBP]

They were always nasty. I've reached the point where I'm doing this in my break time at work. Hope they don't get worried if they see I visit "the art of murder" regularly.

[BBP]

Has anyone heard from Michael lately? It's been half a year since I last heard from him...

[Elrond]

I emailed with him back in early March. Want me to reach out to him and let him know you're trying to get a hold?

[BBP]

Yes please. I'm doing my best here but it's no good since I cannot prevent spammers from posting.

[Elrond]

I emailed but so far have heard nothing back...

[BBP]

Sorry to hear that, I hope he's okay...

[BBP]

I had to delete over 60 topics today due to two vicious spammers. If you happen to miss a topic, please let me know.

[cacums]

Sorry to hear that, I hope he's okay...

I talked to him last week on Facebook but didn't talk about anything Clue or Forum related

[BBP]

OK, good to hear he's at least still around...

[BBP]

Deleted 50+ topics again. Please let me know if you miss something.