thaddeus Posted August 8, 2006 I see Sean quickly disposed of the SPAM in the tech support...i googled her name and saw it was connected to quite a few websites with different e-mails all saying the same thing..but on another board, there was a similar story about the credit cards and meeting a guy but from a different persona. Since 'she' signed up, it would be interesting to see if any real discussion comes about. I'm pretty sure it's just e-mail trolling, but imagine if there was a lonely girl in russia who is desparately seeking a mate like this..could this be an international 'sleepless in seattle'?? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
sean Posted August 18, 2006 I've been getting a LOT of this lately and as the board gets bigger am going to need to find a better solution to preventing it. I've been having to delete 10-40 fake new users a week. A lot of it seems connected to this lonely Russian girl without a credit card scam. Some people must be making halfway decent money with it. I am guessing they try to flirt you into signing the both of you up for a dating service account (via their affiliate link of course) under the pretense that she will upload photos of herself, etc. I dunno. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
SifuPhil Posted August 19, 2006 I've been getting a LOT of this lately and as the board gets bigger am going to need to find a better solution to preventing it. I've been having to delete 10-40 fake new users a week. A lot of it seems connected to this lonely Russian girl without a credit card scam. Some people must be making halfway decent money with it. I am guessing they try to flirt you into signing the both of you up for a dating service account (via their affiliate link of course) under the pretense that she will upload photos of herself, etc. I dunno. Sean, if it's a bot or spider and not a real person, you could always opt for the - I believe they call it a "captcha" - you have to enter the letters/numbers in order to sign in? I believe they even have a version with a picture and a multiple-choice answer - "This picture shows a..." Â If it's a human...hmmm...not sure about that. You already have the good idea of requiring an intro post first...another board I'm on right now has a sudden flood of the "joke" spams. The sender tells a stupid joke, and at the bottom, their sig consists of a small ad for Xanax / Viagra / what-have-you. I suppose they think it's a cute way to market, but it's still spam to most viewers, and it's just another "user" that won't be posting after their initial post. Â One other possible solution comes to mind - ask for a volunteer for spam patrol - limited mod abilities - only function is to wipe out spam posts. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
sean Posted August 19, 2006 Sean, if it's a bot or spider and not a real person, you could always opt for the - I believe they call it a "captcha" - you have to enter the letters/numbers in order to sign in? I believe they even have a version with a picture and a multiple-choice answer - "This picture shows a..." Doh, I thought I had that turned on. I just turned it on. But I've been reading a lot of posts on the IPB support forums lately about this wave of Russian spammers. They are hitting everyone. And the bots can crack most of the captchas including the default IPBs. Â The intro post does help a lot! 99.9% of the time it's completely obvious in this first post what a person's intention here is. And plus I think it encourages people to say hi which we all love. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
SifuPhil Posted August 19, 2006 Doh, I thought I had that turned on. I just turned it on. But I've been reading a lot of posts on the IPB support forums lately about this wave of Russian spammers. They are hitting everyone. And the bots can crack most of the captchas including the default IPBs. Â The intro post does help a lot! 99.9% of the time it's completely obvious in this first post what a person's intention here is. And plus I think it encourages people to say hi which we all love. Wow- didn't know the spammers had that much of a leg up on things - goes to show what a specialty field spam prevention is, I suppose. Â And yes, I like the intro idea - even though I'm usually an intro type, I know a lot of folks aren't, and maybe it would help bring them out of the virtual closet, so to speak. And if it helps stop spammers - all that much better. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Smile Posted August 19, 2006 You can check your logs and see the bot's signature under which they come to your site. The most common would be Mozilla, IE, Googlebot etc. Then you create a robots.txt file and put a disallow line for this bot. I have one for the bot that gathers pictures that made 300Mb/month of traffic on one of my sites. Here is a copy of my file: User-agent: * Disallow: /store/ User-agent: sna-0.0.1 Disallow: / Â Â The user-agent is usually a signature of a bot. Type in google robots.txt and they explain more how to use it. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
SifuPhil Posted August 19, 2006 Here is a copy of my file: User-agent: * Disallow: /store/ User-agent: sna-0.0.1 Disallow: / The user-agent is usually a signature of a bot. Type in google robots.txt and they explain more how to use it. Robots.txt is good as far as it goes, but I understand some engines totally disregard them, and will only read a robot file that is placed in the root directory. Depending on the hosting arrangement, you might not always be able to place your file there, so you'd need to go solely with the robots.txt approach. Â It's still better than nothing, certainly. It just seems like the old cops-and-robbers game - we put up a new safeguard; they find a way around it. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
