Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

nonrev.net · 2010-05-22 7:18 pm

Everytime somebody marks a person coming in from AOL.com's proxy servers as a spammer, my forum's interface to stopforumspam.com ends up blocking EVERYONE from AOL.

This is somewhat unique since AOL, as an ISP, forces all web traffic through a small number of proxy servers.

Any chance you guys could "whitelist" IP addresses that resolve to *.proxy.aol.com ?

pedigree · 2010-05-22 7:35 pm

No chance at all, youll need to whitelist AOL at your end

zaphod · 2010-05-22 9:19 pm

Whitelist a proxy?

NEVER.

(Well, that's my vote on it at least.)

Zap

Reines · 2010-05-23 8:04 am

zaphod wrote:

Whitelist a proxy?

It's not an open proxy, it's how the ISP works - customers don't have a choice in it.

pedigree · 2010-05-23 9:38 am

yes they do, its called "finding another isp"

allowing every customer on AOL, that either wants to spam, is too stupid to secure to their PC or is just plain ignorant, the open gates to spam, is a very bad idea.

There is NO way that we will whitelist anything. Not even my home ip/iprange is whitelisted.

Reines wrote:

zaphod wrote:
Whitelist a proxy?
It's not an open proxy, it's how the ISP works - customers don't have a choice in it.

He never said "open" but its a proxy to the million of PCs on AOL.

Avril Lavigne Admin · 2010-05-23 2:34 pm

pedigree wrote:

yes they do, its called "finding another isp"

I totally agree. I hate AOL for a lot of reasons. Making it impossible to ban a member without affecting many others, is just one of them. I would ban all of AOL if it weren't for the fact so many of my members are minors and as a result, are literally stuck with their parents choice of ISPs. Otherwise, I would have no problem telling potential members to choose another ISP.

zaphod · 2010-05-23 4:23 pm

And not all AOL traffic must use the proxy. If they just turn off their "turbo" (Which really does no good except degrade pictures), they would be directly connecting, instead of going through a proxy.

Or at least that was the way it was 2 years ago with AOL. What those people need to do, is start their AOL connection, minimize the AOL spybrowser (they collect info on you, like mad, for the sake of marketing), and then use Firefox or Opera. Anyone who thinks they have to use the AOL proxies are sorely mistaken, uninformed, or trying to hide from detection.

But to reiterate... Stop Forum Spam is a BLACKLISTING service. There is no negation here of a valid spam report with a whitelist. If an IP generates actual spam, it gets listed... period.

Zap

pedigree · 2010-05-23 6:40 pm

Well, we dont blacklist anything, we just list IP numbers of spammers, what you do with them is ,of course, entirely up to you

zaphod · 2010-05-24 12:11 am

True, but that is kind of the same with all the other services. Perhaps I shouldn't have said blacklist, and instead said DARKGREYRESEMBLINGBLACKLIST...

ahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Zap

RFiend · 2010-09-28 5:55 am

Guys, WE GET that you hate anything having to do with AOL. Really.

However, barring the other 99.999% of AOL members because an indescribably small number of real spammers are also using AOL does nothing but cause frustration for us forum admins. You've invalidated the whole purpose of stopping spammers by forcing us to either utterly ignore the IP check or manually approve every clueless AOL user. Yep, they're all clueless, but only a tiny fraction are spammers.

In effect, by allowing the AOL proxies in the database, you're saying that ALL idiots that use AOL are spammer suspects requiring my personal attention. Hell, I could easily say the same thing about a number of ISPs in Northern Europe that we've recently had 'bots register through. The same goes for several big ISPs here in the USofA like Comcast. Truthfully, most of the Comcast addresses are pseudo-static, so we have been banning individual IPs from their service, but the 'bots that we've had from Europe are on dial-up with a random IP from the pool. I'm not going to grey-list every damned ISP on the planet when ONE person with that service uses a spam script... doing so puts me right back where I started before I found StopForumSpam (i.e. - manually approving every darned registration!)

If your database isn't credible and USEFUL, then you're wasting your time. Flagging the AOL proxies as SPAM just because you have a bug up your rears for AOL lusers is rather childish. Get over it.

zaphod · 2010-09-28 9:42 am

That is why a future version of my software will have a double captcha that will whitelist any human run IP for one hour against a stop forum spam, or other remote database listing.

RFiend wrote:

If your database isn't credible and USEFUL, then you're wasting your time. Flagging the AOL proxies as SPAM just because you have a bug up your rears for AOL lusers is rather childish. Get over it.

Our database is credible, is useful, and only lists an IP as spam when we get an actual spamming attempt from said IP.

I would also question who has the insect in their anus.

Zap

P.S. It is actually rather easy via DNS lookup to see if an IP is coming from an ISP like AOL, and skip a check. But one should not trust X-Forwarded-For headers alone, as those can be faked. It must come from a *.proxy.aol.com address, AND have an x-forwarded-for before a bypass should be done.

pedigree · 2010-09-28 2:31 pm

AOL wont get whitelist, nor will any IP. There isnt a whitelist for the database, not even my IP at home. Its not our fault that AOL are so tight on cash as they force proxy use for users but AOL users are just as stupid as any other ISP users by not securing their computers or by running spamming software.

If an AOL user gets denied access to a site, the options are
- get them to manually create an account
- get another ISP that doesnt farm you down proxy servers used for spamming.
- complain at AOL

One of the absolute reasons why there isnt a rDNS whitelist is that rDNS isnt trust worthy.

kpatz · 2010-09-28 4:29 pm

SFS isn't a blacklist at all. It's just a list of IPs,emails and usernames that forum admins have submitted at some time or another of entities that are known to have spammed.

SFS is simply a list. A database. You (or the admin of the forum you're using) can query it to see if a given IP, username or email is listed. What you (or the forum admin) does with this information is up to you/them.

A forum admin that configures their forum to blacklist registrations using SFS data and gets lots of AOL users should be able to whitelist AOL on their end, depending on what anti-spam mod code they are using. But the decision to whitelist or not whitelist is up to the admin of the forum in question, not SFS or its owners/admins like Pedigree.

On the forum I run, I don't reject registrations if their IP is listed. Instead I flag them so that their posts are moderated. When they post, a mod will review and approve the posts, and if they are legitimate, they'll be moved into a registered usergroup, and the SFS data will no longer apply to that registration. And of course, if they spam, they're trashed, banned, and listed on SFS.

Last edited by kpatz (2010-09-28 4:31 pm)

pedigree · 2010-09-28 5:31 pm

exactly, our database is simply a list of usernames, IP and email addresses that have spammed over time. What people do with the details of our database, is entirely up to them.

That is why I ignore and delete emails that simply say "Im not a spammer, why am I listed" or via google translation, "i not spammer, my me list"

zaphod · 2010-09-28 7:25 pm

I forgot about DNS Stuffing/Cache Poisoning Pedigree. Was hoping that would go away with random-port DNS, but I guess it hasn't.

BTW... due to random DNS porting, and no patch released to fix the TCP/IP stack in Windows 95, "Windows 95" User-Agents are NEVER client browsers.

Zap

scottinaz · 2010-09-30 1:20 pm

Hmm,,, AOL uses more than one ip address don't they ? I am sure I have probably banned one or two of them in the past,,

apleschu · 2010-10-22 12:52 am

Re: AOL

We decided quite a while ago to no longer accept aol.com address as valid addresses. Reason here is that AOL in their infinite wisdom sometime decide that our signup emails or the password reset emails are spam and instead of delivering it into a spam folder they delete it right away before the user even has a chance to see or retrieve it.

Thats why we declared some time ago we no longer accept aol as valid email addresses. It costs us just too much manual intervention to help all the aol users (and on avg the IQ of the typical AOL user is lower)

I would just hope that more folks would follow that example and then slowly AOL would start take notice.

Anyway, thats just us.

bobnv · 2010-11-25 11:43 pm

Our forum has blocked 3 or 4 AOL registrations since we started using SFS, on the other hand SFS has prevented over 12,000 spammer registrations in that same period of time.

Not hard to do the math is it................................

I live in Nevada, I'll take those odds any day.

#1 2010-05-22 7:18 pm

Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#2 2010-05-22 7:35 pm

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#3 2010-05-22 9:19 pm

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#4 2010-05-23 8:04 am

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#5 2010-05-23 9:38 am

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#6 2010-05-23 2:34 pm

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#7 2010-05-23 4:23 pm

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#8 2010-05-23 6:40 pm

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#9 2010-05-24 12:11 am

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#10 2010-09-28 5:55 am

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#11 2010-09-28 9:42 am

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#12 2010-09-28 2:31 pm

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#13 2010-09-28 4:29 pm

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#14 2010-09-28 5:31 pm

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#15 2010-09-28 7:25 pm

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#16 2010-09-30 1:20 pm

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#17 2010-10-22 12:52 am

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

#18 2010-11-25 11:43 pm

Re: Whitelist for AOL.com proxies?

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