Bots/Person Spamming Off Topic

Warlord777 · **Posted:** Thu Jan 20, 2011 5:37 am

What is up with all of the porn and drug ads being posted in Off Topic? Is there some way to ban their IP? We don't need this stuff here! :sad:

Sacrilege83 · **Posted:** Thu Jan 20, 2011 6:24 am

They see a 4000+ group in come the sharks, and yeah it's ridiculous. On the plus side the mods do clean up the forums and at least these spammers post in the Off Topic area if it means anything.

valpas · **Posted:** Thu Jan 20, 2011 7:28 am

It's a daily job to delete the spam posts and ban the accounts and IPs from which the posts come. They post in every forum, not just Off Topic.

When you see a spam post, please mark it by clicking the (!) button. It will then be shown to us and deleted about as soon as one of the mods logs in.

We keep on gunning them down and they keep on coming. :-X

-- Pasi

Red Corsairs · **Posted:** Thu Jan 20, 2011 8:02 am

I report these as soon as I see them, and yes they don't just post in off-topic, I saw there was one the other day that posted 34 posts throughout every section. Thanks to all the staff for keeping on top of them, I hope there's a way of stopping them.

Dezartfox · **Posted:** Thu Jan 20, 2011 10:54 am

Yeah I've had them on my forum too, and that has barely any members, they seemed to have got through all the phpBB defenses

hithero · **Posted:** Thu Jan 20, 2011 12:30 pm

They are becomming a nightmare on TLA too, must be these type of boards, I now have to verify every new prospective member before allowing them on and probably just 1 in 12 are legit - it's becoming a very time consuming operation.

Sacrilege83 · **Posted:** Thu Jan 20, 2011 2:11 pm

Btw what's up with these Google[bot], yahoo[bot], [spider] and all these others that keep on signing in on the members list? They're given access by phpBB to do commercial research or something?

valpas · **Posted:** Thu Jan 20, 2011 3:17 pm

Those Google/Yahoo/whatever bots do the same thing they do all the time for the whole web: read pages and add them to the search index so that they show up in the Google etc. searches. phpBB shows them as search robots so that they don't show as 'people' and count towards how many actual people are browsing the boards.

In general, they are a good thing and nothing to worry about.

-- Pasi

{aD}??? · **Joined:** Thu Dec 30, 2010 3:17 am **Posts:** 202

Could someone please delete samunellarichardson advertising proscar BS.

Cheers AD

Treegoatee'94 · **Posted:** Thu Jan 20, 2011 10:39 pm

Spam everywhere!!

TheBucklandBrewer · **Posted:** Fri Jan 21, 2011 7:41 am

If you see them, just press the "[ ! ]" on the button under the message.
There's no need for further messages in the forum. We (moderators) see the topics you "[ ! ]-'ed as soon as we log in, see we can deal with them right away. In fact when you "[ ! ]" them, we'll notice much faster then when there's talked about in the forum.
Their posters get banned by name, email and IP... But there are just soooo many twats around this world who have to express their ultimate nerdity and think they rule when they succeed on posting spam...

:roll:

Dezartfox · **Posted:** Sun Jan 23, 2011 4:07 pm

I sorted my spam problem on my forum, I simply changed the CAPTCHA settings to be a little more difficult

No spam since.

Dagorlad · **Posted:** Sun Jan 23, 2011 9:57 pm

Spambots use Optical Character Recognition software to beat the Captcha. They filter out the known background images and are left with the shapes of the letters only, so the built-in Captcha for phpBB is pretty much useless. So I cranked it up a notch and introduced random backgrounds into the mix and it seems to have stopped the bots.

Red Corsairs · **Posted:** Sun Jan 23, 2011 10:50 pm

Great news Alan!

theavenger001 · **Posted:** Tue Jan 25, 2011 6:25 pm

Thanks so much.

Eorltheyoung · **Posted:** Tue Jan 25, 2011 7:52 pm

Yeah on my forum they post like 25 times a day. Its terrible.

Kyrrial Deogar · **Posted:** Mon Jan 31, 2011 3:24 pm

more spam today =\ and this time in every forum...

Drazmar · **Joined:** Mon Jan 31, 2011 9:05 pm **Posts:** 25

Dagorlad wrote:

Spambots use Optical Character Recognition software to beat the Captcha. They filter out the known background images and are left with the shapes of the letters only, so the built-in Captcha for phpBB is pretty much useless. So I cranked it up a notch and introduced random backgrounds into the mix and it seems to have stopped the bots.

That meant sigining up for me took about half an hour.

Bots/Person Spamming Off Topic

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