Be more proactive to prevent spam

C

calande

We all know how bsdforums.org was flooded with spam and nothing serious was done to fight it...I saw you use reCaptcha to prevent spam. This is not enough. It clearly won't stop spammers. I suggest using a challenge/response feature to further stop spammers during registration. The question asked should be taken from a pool of questions and answers, and should be related to FreeBSD so that regular spammers can't reply properly and give up. For instance if you ask something like "What starts with the letter K, ends with the letter L and can be compiled under FreeBSD?" I doubt a regular spammer can reply properly. If we wait and see, we're going to run into much frustration fighting the spammer armada :\
 
If it comes to that point, we will setup something like that. Until then I'd like to avoid it.
 
calande said:
The question asked should be taken from a pool of questions and answers, and should be related to FreeBSD so that regular spammers can't reply properly and give up. For instance if you ask something like "What starts with the letter K, ends with the letter L and can be compiled under FreeBSD?" I doubt a regular spammer can reply properly. If we wait and see, we're going to run into much frustration fighting the spammer armada :\
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I don't even know what is it? (and i use freebsd for quite some time, i don't use KDE)
What's the answer?
 
I would say...Watch out for new registrations and look at their profiles regularly. I have moderated another forum and there were tens of new registrations per day, but very few of those "users" contributed. Instead, they would edit their user profiles and add backlinks in their profiles.

Other spammers have a different technique. They register users in bulk, and each "user" contributes with common-sense threads and replies, such as "I agree with you on this point", or "How do I format my hard-disk drive?", stuff like that. Other users reply, thinking it's a genuine post. Time goes by, the posts pass on to the 2nd page, and at one point, the spammers remotely edit in bulk all those old posts, remove the content and paste in backlinks. There are tons of forum posts out there that have people replying to a post that has nothing but backlinks.
 
calande said:
Other spammers have a different technique. They register users in bulk, and each "user" contributes with common-sense threads and replies, such as "I agree with you on this point", or "How do I format my hard-disk drive?", stuff like that. Other users reply, thinking it's a genuine post. Time goes by, the posts pass on to the 2nd page, and at one point, the spammers remotely edit in bulk all those old posts, remove the content and paste in backlinks. There are tons of forum posts out there that have people replying to a post that has nothing but backlinks.
Click to expand...

I hate to say but this is definitely an innovative and sophisticated spamming technique.

I was studying spam sometime ago, because there was someone called me for help, but his problem was much more simpler (standard, in other words). The spammers register accounts manually. When they create new thread or reply for an existing thread, they will include backlinks, so it wasnt too hard to fix. I told him, for every new account, if his first 5 posts contains urls or words in filter list, hold those posts, send admin a SMS/email for approval. If admin do nothing == doesnt approve within 1 day, the post will be automatically deleted.
 
how about just what does rtfm is i know my posts on lynx was dumb i hated that lol but lynx is kinda hard to learn
 
especially when i had reread and reread but was still confused one was understanding how the ip and hostnames were interrealated
 
Oh, you mean you don't like when someone asks you to read the docs? I don't either, because most of the time, I have already read the docs. But there is a nicer way to say "RTFM". Just point the user to the particular section of the docs that will solve his problem with a link. Or point to the Google search results that give him the answer :)
 
LOL...When I read your posts that are absolutely off-topic, I can't help asking you...Are you a bot, cliedo? :p
 
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