SPAM ON THE FORUM

Post your suggestions and feedback for the forum. You can also report a problem, troubleshoot an issue with forum functionality, or suggest new board topics.
Post Reply
Think Different
Junior Poster
Posts: 907
Joined: April 7th, 2010, 9:28 pm
Location: Germany

SPAM ON THE FORUM

Post by Think Different »

WINSTON, CAN'T YOU BLOCK LLCOOLJ AND HIS ILK FROM SPAMMING YOUR FORUM WITH CRAP? IT'S PRETTY ANNOYING.


Meet Loads of Foreign Women in Person! Join Our Happier Abroad ROMANCE TOURS to Many Overseas Countries!

Meet Foreign Women Now! Post your FREE profile on Happier Abroad Personals and start receiving messages from gorgeous Foreign Women today!

User avatar
Winston
Site Admin
Posts: 37670
Joined: August 18th, 2007, 6:16 am
Contact:

Post by Winston »

Hi all,
I expanded the humanizer question to ask the registrant to this forum to enter all three digits of James Bond's agent code number. Yet the spam is still coming in. How can that be? Are these human spammers or auto bots? How would auto bots be able to answer any humanizer question I put here?

Do human spammers actually take the time to register here so they can put phone ads here? That seems like an inefficient use of time.

Momopi, or anyone else, what do you think?
Check out my FUN video clips in Russia and SE Asia and Female Encounters of the Foreign Kind video series and Full Russia Trip Videos!

Join my Dating Site to meet thousands of legit foreign girls at low cost!

"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne
Think Different
Junior Poster
Posts: 907
Joined: April 7th, 2010, 9:28 pm
Location: Germany

Post by Think Different »

If you look at the members list, it seems there are pages and pages of strange names that appear to be likely generated by bots. Perhaps you can just start blocking/canceling those members' accounts. If they've never posted anything but junk, they likely are not contributing members.
User avatar
Winston
Site Admin
Posts: 37670
Joined: August 18th, 2007, 6:16 am
Contact:

Post by Winston »

RedDog wrote:If you look at the members list, it seems there are pages and pages of strange names that appear to be likely generated by bots. Perhaps you can just start blocking/canceling those members' accounts. If they've never posted anything but junk, they likely are not contributing members.
I wish I could do it that easily, but there are about 5000 spam accounts in the member lists, and there is no easy way to delete them all. It takes a while just to delete one even.
Check out my FUN video clips in Russia and SE Asia and Female Encounters of the Foreign Kind video series and Full Russia Trip Videos!

Join my Dating Site to meet thousands of legit foreign girls at low cost!

"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne
User avatar
Winston
Site Admin
Posts: 37670
Joined: August 18th, 2007, 6:16 am
Contact:

Post by Winston »

Since the humanizer question doesn't work anymore, I've found another way to reduce spam here. I've removed web links from profiles and from signatures too. I heard that many spam bots will not register on forums if they can't put a link in a profile or a signature. Is that true?

I still don't get how they are getting past the humanizer question though.

Momopi?

Adam917?
Check out my FUN video clips in Russia and SE Asia and Female Encounters of the Foreign Kind video series and Full Russia Trip Videos!

Join my Dating Site to meet thousands of legit foreign girls at low cost!

"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne
momopi
Elite Upper Class Poster
Posts: 4898
Joined: August 31st, 2007, 9:44 pm
Location: Orange County, California

Post by momopi »

It only costs a few dollars per day to hire someone in India to go online and post spam for you.

Eh, since I invested in a SEO business, I should now. My partner (the majority owner) is in China and he hired 4 girls to write stuff online all day.
Montanaland
Freshman Poster
Posts: 130
Joined: August 19th, 2009, 3:57 pm
Location: Billings, MT

daily check

Post by Montanaland »

All you can do is check the forum daily or every other day and delete the spam immedietly. ...Or have other members also delete them as I would volunteer and I'm sure other members would help you keep a handle on it by deleting.
User avatar
Winston
Site Admin
Posts: 37670
Joined: August 18th, 2007, 6:16 am
Contact:

Post by Winston »

Ok whew!

I just installed a mod from the phpBB support site, which allows me to mass delete users and spammers at once. Using that, I was able to bring up all users with zero posts, which are likely to be spammers, and mass delete them all at once.

Then I repeated the process with users with one post, two, and so on, retaining only the users I recognize as legitimate posters or are unlikely to be spammers. With that, over 5000 spam accounts were eliminated from this forum! Hurray!

Thank God for mods. Otherwise, there's no way I could delete 5000+ spam accounts one by one. It'd take way too long.

Next, I went through the memberlist, having trimmed it to just over 300, and deleted the few remaining that had porn sites linked to their profile, which I can see easily next to their user name.

So now we are down to the number of legitimate accounts here, which is only at 310. So, I guess we never really had 5000+ registered users after all, since all but 310 of them were spam accounts. Darn.

Anyhow, I don't think I deleted any legitimate accounts, but if I did by accident, then I apologize and invite you to re-register.

The thousands of spam accounts here with links in their profiles to porn and viagra sites, I think, is what brought this site's google page rank to zero, and why this forum has been banned from Yahoo search. So I hope that with this mass pruning that I did, all that will be fixed and we can be indexed properly.

So that's the update.

I'm still looking for other ways to combat the daily spam problem here.

Thanks,
Winston
Check out my FUN video clips in Russia and SE Asia and Female Encounters of the Foreign Kind video series and Full Russia Trip Videos!

Join my Dating Site to meet thousands of legit foreign girls at low cost!

"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne
Post Reply
  • Similar Topics
    Replies
    Views
    Last post

Return to “Suggestions, Feedback, Problem Reports, Troubleshooting”