board Spamers

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aussiept
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board Spamers

Post by aussiept »

hi all
i have recently noticed spam users coming on and posting in illrelavent sections of the same stuff
is there any way of stoping them from registring on the board
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Fleet Lists
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Re: board Spamers

Post by Fleet Lists »

We are trying to do everyhting we can to stop them.

But in most xases it is impossible to recognise them as a spammer at the time they register.

The best we can do at the moment is to delete them and their posts as soon as we know about them.

Investigations are continuing into finding better ways to stop them.

And i can assure you that it is not just a recent thing - it has been happening for a long time.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by Windy »

Maybe if an introductory email was part of the requirement, or a statement outlining their interest in buses/transport, that could filter out the idiots and the spammers?
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Re: board Spamers

Post by howlerbus »

Fleet Lists wrote:We are trying to do everyhting we can to stop them.

But in most xases it is impossible to recognise them as a spammer at the time they register.

The best we can do at the moment is to delete them and their posts as soon as we know about them.

Investigations are continuing into finding better ways to stop them.

And i can assure you that it is not just a recent thing - it has been happening for a long time.
And spammers are dealt with pretty quickly here, which is good :)
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Re: board Spamers

Post by Fleet Lists »

Windy wrote:Maybe if an introductory email was part of the requirement, or a statement outlining their interest in buses/transport, that could filter out the idiots and the spammers?
I think there would be more work in that for adminstrators to go through all the applications compared with the current workload to delete any spammers. We did try something similar some time ago and it did not work as we found spammers still worked their ways around that and then you have the borderline cases which I think I would not have approved and in the longer term they turned out to be good members.

And it causes delays in approval which tends to turn new contributors off as they want to join when they something to say and not some hours or more later when they have probably signed off and we do not hear from them again.

Unfortunately spammers are a problem we have to live with and I do think we clean them up as promptly as any site that I know of.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by mjja »

I can confirm that there's not really anything you can do about spammers joining up except clean up after them and ban suspicious-sounding email addresses from joining.

The advantage of a well trafficked forum like this one is that there are plenty of users around who can click "Report this post" and that makes the admins' jobs easier because they don't have to trawl through the board themselves.
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Ken
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Re: board Spamers

Post by Ken »

howlerbus wrote:And spammers are dealt with pretty quickly here, which is good :)
Like removing graffiti, that is one of the best way to deal with spammers. I would like to thank Fleet Lists and the other admins for removing such messages/users promptly.

There are no other simple options which we implement at this point, but there are other options which require more complicated action which I will implement when I have the time to do so.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by G1337 »

I've just been thinking most of these spammers are bots and they mainly pick their targets but tags and topic headings just an idea but making the buy swap and sell viewable only to registered users will make less spam bots pick up as I'm pretty sure those kind of category's would be one of their targets.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by Ken »

G1337 wrote:making the buy swap and sell viewable only to registered users will make less spam bots pick up
Sorry but personally I don't think that will lower the amount of spam.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by dpalenski »

yes they don't only post in buy sell swap section you know
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Re: board Spamers

Post by G1337 »

nzbcfanboi wrote:yes they don't only post in buy sell swap section you know

but what I am saying its that section that would be one of the major factors for the bots to visit the site. So what they post in other sections they are spammers what do you expect.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by Fleet Lists »

G1337 wrote:

but what I am saying its that section that would be one of the major factors for the bots to visit the site. So what they post in other sections they are spammers what do you expect.
An analysis of bot visits shows that they do NOT primarily visit the buy/sell/swap section. And it is NOT the bots which post the SPAM. The bots visit the site to retrieve data for various search engines - a very welcome thing.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by mjja »

The only way to stop them is to block people from signing up from free email addresses - but that means anyone who doesn't own a domain name has to email the admins to sign up! Just not practical.

We've had a pretty good run here (or else I'm just lucky) - there isn't a load of spam more than once every few months.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by Fleet Lists »

We do get about two a day on average but we do get rid of them very quickly.

And we have even had them from email addresses with domain sites.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by tiger_man »

Fleet Lists wrote:We do get about two a day on average but we do get rid of them very quickly.

And we have even had them from email addresses with domain sites.
But in reality, about 98% of them don't actually come from who they say they are.

For Example you might get an email from someone [at] gmail [dot] com but when you go and look at the various headers and stuff like that, the email server is something like mail [dot] messenger [dot] org

But then again, you might get the odd one who puts in the correct email address
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Re: board Spamers

Post by Hornibrook »

All you need to do is just delete messages and block IP (i think you can do that).
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Re: board Spamers

Post by Fleet Lists »

That would be great if they used the same IP but they do not.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by G1337 »

You should look the ip's up on http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ and block the ones identified as also belonging to the same spammer.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by Ken »

G1337 wrote:You should look the ip's up on http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ and block the ones identified as also belonging to the same spammer.
Do you know this same spammers name so we might ask him nicely to stop?

Your suggestions while fine in theory, in practice would take more time to implement than it does to simply remove the small number of spam messages this forum receives.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by G1337 »

Nope why would I know him ?!?!?

I just have run a few sites that have had a problems with spammers.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by TP 3000 »

Our latest spammer is eniola09. However if you search this user's email of , you should see the amount of items that they have posted on other sites/forums (537).
Last edited by Fleet Lists on Mon Apr 20, 2009 12:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Email address removed so that it one less for Google to find
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Re: board Spamers

Post by Fleet Lists »

By now the number of hits in Google has gone up to 610.

But it goes to show that most sites are not as vigilant as we are, in that such posts stay there for Google to pick them up, while we waste no time getting rid of them
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Re: board Spamers

Post by TP 3000 »

Is it all right in doing what I did of posting the spammer email?
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Re: board Spamers

Post by Ken »

TP 3000 wrote:Is it all right in doing what I did of posting the spammer email?
No harm done, but as with graffiti the best thing to do is just remove their posts ASAP without giving them any publicity.
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Re: board Spamers

Post by Fleet Lists »

Hence I did remove the email address from the post so that it is one less for Google and other search engines to find.

Otherwise I agree with Ken.
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