Forums being spammed?

**ptrowski** · 03-31-2009 11:11 AM

I have not noticed any posts yet but alot of the recent members have names that are made up or follow certain patterns and their profiles are obviously fake and locations are highly suspect.

Is someone trying to bog down the site

?

**burris** · 03-31-2009 11:21 AM

Originally Posted by ptrowski

I have not noticed any posts yet but alot of the recent members have names that are made up or follow certain patterns and their profiles are obviously fake and locations are highly suspect.

Is someone trying to bog down the site

?

I do see some difficult names appearing, but if you look at the member list at the bottom, they all appear to be legitimate.

**ptrowski** · 03-31-2009 11:25 AM

Really? A lot of the occupations are listed as "Man" and the locations are highly suspect.
Yesterday they were following a 4 letter and 4 number convention, today they are different. I even saw a signature as "free cigarettes, click here".

No biggie, just a heads up to the admins.

**VOIPoTim** · 03-31-2009 11:57 AM

It's possible. We're a target for a lot of attacks given our affiliation with HostGator (1.8 million websites means even a 1% rate of unhappy users is a 18K people out to get us).

If any posts come up, we'll take care of them.

**ptrowski** · 03-31-2009 12:06 PM

Very true! Just thought you might want to know as it seemed very suspect.

**chpalmer** · 03-31-2009 10:51 PM

member pages are a popular way to spam. At the height on a forum I admin for we had about 15 a day coming in. Larger forums get many more. Mainly Bots designed for that purpose. All you can do is delete them as they appear and hope for a forum upgrade that closes any holes they use...

VOIPoJustin · 04-01-2009 12:27 AM

Spam -- A never ending battle.

Sometimes 'captcha'/etc filters within the registration process can help a bit (if the bot registration attempt is completely automated).

Somewhat on topic: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0...of-all-e-mail/

**KenH** · 04-01-2009 10:38 AM

You know, I've wondered about this for some time. The usernames don't follow normal conventions - a lot are cryptic combinations and most users don't choose usernames like that.

**ptrowski** · 04-01-2009 11:29 AM

That's what I was thinking. The locations are all over the world and their occupation etc is "Man".

VOIPoJustin · 04-01-2009 12:05 PM

Just added reCAPTCHA image/word verification to the signup process, so this should alleviate the barrage of suspect registrations.

The reCAPTCHA project/idea is actually pretty neat, you can read about it here:
http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html