#1 2008-02-27 7:38 pm

Cobra97

Member

From: Chicago suburbs

Registered: 2008-02-27

Posts: 8

Some sort of spam flood?

Hi all,

   First off great forum here!

I have a small forum and with in the last month or so I have had any where from 6 - 20 guests log on with in seconds of each other with almost identical IP address....just a number off ot so.

What the heck are they trying to do, it's fishy as hell?

Thanks

Captain Red

Member

Registered: 2008-01-04

Posts: 59

Re: Some sort of spam flood?

Hi all,

   First off great forum here!

I have a small forum and with in the last month or so I have had any where from 6 - 20 guests log on with in seconds of each other with almost identical IP address....just a number off ot so.

What the heck are they trying to do, it's fishy as hell?

Thanks

Most likely it's somebody spidering your site.  What's one of the IP addresses?  You might be able to find out if it's a legitimate site by doing some research on the IPs.

(or you could turn all spiders away in a robots.txt file, and if it's the spider is legit/properly written, they should go away.  If you actually want the site spidered by search engines, though, this might not be a good solution)

My guess?  They're probably not legit.  Running a forum has turned me a bit cynical in this regard, though.

Cobra97

Member

From: Chicago suburbs

Registered: 2008-02-27

Posts: 8

Re: Some sort of spam flood?

I have been checking the IP addresses, and there not legit just as you thought.   There from all over the place but most are from Ukraine, Russia and Germany.

I've only had the forum going for about 6 months and I feel like I'm in a war.....I never new it was like this before.

This might be a dumb question, but what the heck do they want?  I can't understand why the would spend so much time trying to hack a small forum.

Thanks

Captain Red

Member

Registered: 2008-01-04

Posts: 59

Re: Some sort of spam flood?

I have been checking the IP addresses, and there not legit just as you thought.   There from all over the place but most are from Ukraine, Russia and Germany.

I've only had the forum going for about 6 months and I feel like I'm in a war.....I never new it was like this before.

This might be a dumb question, but what the heck do they want?  I can't understand why the would spend so much time trying to hack a small forum.

Thanks

The thing is, it isn't so much time for them.  The spammers set up their bots, and let them go into the wild.  Some gather email addresses.  Some send spam emails.  Some do both.  And then there are some that gather the addresses of message boards or post spam in them or both.

If your forum is small, there probably isn't a lot of hacking going on either.  On a small forum, you could employ countermeasures that work "perfectly," and so long as none of your countermeasures are also used by a more prominent forum(or your forum doesn't grow into prominence itself), it is highly unlikely that anyone would take the time to crack them.

The idea, for them, is to spread their spam as far and wide, and onto as many sites as possible, so as to raise their search engine rankings.  Getting their spam onto larger, more popular sites does more to achieve their ends, but every site the spammers can get one of the search engine spiders to find them on helps them achieve their goals.

I'm still learning about all this, though, so take the above with as large a grain of salt as you'd like. :¬)

But are they just logging in and not doing anything?  Are any of them posting?  Are any of them registering and not posting?

(Sorry about the lag in response)