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#26 2017-08-15 11:27 pm

Papa Parrot
Member
From: Mexico
Registered: 2011-08-19
Posts: 1,826
Website

Re: Forum Spam Registration Attack

sklerder wrote:

Hi !

Spam is preventable, of course, but not 100% ...
The challenge is to be the closest to 100% smile

If I get spam, I'm not happy, but if I didn't have any spam attempt, I wouldn't be no more happy.
This would be that my website is of no interest !

It does kind of make one wonder, when there is absolutely no spam attempts, it makes me think maybe the site is down or
not accessible by the public.

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#27 2017-08-31 1:13 am

Aussiegirl
Member
Registered: 2017-08-31
Posts: 1

Re: Forum Spam Registration Attack

Hi. As a very junior moderator of a different forum, I find this subject fascinating. We have had a rush of new members with related names and Outlook emails signing up recently. In our case, none of them have actually spammed the forum. It is unlikely their intentions are honorable, but they haven't broken any rules. What would be the recommended way to deal with them? Ban them before they spam, or wait until they do, so they can be reported to somewhere like this?

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#28 2017-08-31 2:17 am

Papa Parrot
Member
From: Mexico
Registered: 2011-08-19
Posts: 1,826
Website

Re: Forum Spam Registration Attack

It seems to me like the forum admins would have some guidelines or rules you are supposed to follow.
There are legit non spammer people that use outlook as well, I think that would be a fast way to kill a forum
if a moderator starts banning people that  haven't broken any rules.
Recently I had one that when they first joined , there was no listings for the username, IP , and e-mail,...however
since about 99% of the registrars on this particular forum are spammers and bots, any way, that is why I checked,...
     Ok, well it finally did post, but not spam, just a innocent comment, so no rules broken, no spam, etc.
In any event I checked again , the IP was still clean, but the e-mail had 4 or 5 listings,  so that was enough for me, I deleted and banned it. Nothing to submit, as no spam was posted.
But I am also the admin/owner and moderator, so it is ok, I can do what ever I decide.
If I had moderators,  helping, I would not like it one bit if some moderator started banning any one, new members, or others
simply because they suspect, or think "unlikely their intentions are honorable",....
They key words "they haven't broken any rules."  No rules broken, no reason to ban some one, in fact if some mod started doing that, they would quickly lose their moderator privileges.  For many forum owners / admins a high member count is very important,
and as long as the member does not break any rules, or cause any problems, they want that member.
So this is something you really should be asking you forum admin, or owner, not us.
Another forum , where I am responsible for the spam control, the policy is, If it is actually spam, and posted , I remove it.
It get's moved off the public board, then a admin decides if it will also be submitted here,and on the banning or deleting of the
user.
In some cases, there are new members, that are pretty obvious bots, usually they use their profiles, signature , etc.
On those, I notify the admin, and generally they get deleted,..also even if they did not use the profile , signature, but if
I can provide proof that it is a bot, then they also get deleted.
The main rule : No rules broken, no spam posted, nothing to be done.
   To sum it up, I think if you start using your new moderator privileges like that, and start randomly banning people just because
you don't think their intentions are "honourable", you do not know , it is only your opinion or suspicion, I think if you start doing that
you will only succeed in getting the forum admins angry, as well as many members. But then again, I don't know what policy, guidelines or rules they have.

   One thing that happened on this one forum, they used to ban a lot, including the user name, there were so many user names in the ban list, they started having problems with nobody could register, almost every user name they tried was banned, it also cause the "ban" list data base to crash, it ran out of memory.  The same can happen with IPs, especially when it is a dynamic IP, if to many IP's are banned, you constantly get registrars that are blocked and can not register, because they got assigned a IP that is
in the ban list.
  Just banning people based on the e-mail address and your suspicions is not a good approach.

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#29 2017-08-31 9:34 am

Alex Kemp
Moderator
From: Nottingham, England
Registered: 2009-12-02
Posts: 2,420
Website

Re: Forum Spam Registration Attack

Aussiegirl wrote:

What would be the recommended way to deal with them?

Hi Aussiegirl, welcome to SFS.

I can give one sensible piece of advice, although it is almost certainly above your pay-grade... auto-purge “sleepers”.

The forum I ran was subject to very large numbers of sleepers — users, most of whom looked like spammers, that signed up but then never did a single thing. The biggest danger from such users is from Profile spam (a spam link dropped in the signature field, as one example). That forum was locked down to prevent such issues, but the user database kept growing in an uncontrolled, and alarming, fashion with very spammy-looking usernames. In the end I fixed it with a purpose-written piece of SQL, placed as a cron-job run every night, which purged every new user that had not confirmed their Registration within a week, and every confirmed user that did not post within a month.

Many owners look at the number of Registered Users as a mark of success. That is true only if they are also looking at the number of active human users and, due to the number of spam-bots in existence, each spawning multiple key-wipe users, that is most unlikely. I cannot accurately recall my own stats from the time (15 years ago) but I dimly remember something like 10% users & 90% sleepers. It was a piece of house-cleaning that kept the site sprightly.

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#30 2017-08-31 3:36 pm

kpatz
Member
Registered: 2008-10-09
Posts: 1,437

Re: Forum Spam Registration Attack

What I do, if I see someone register that is suspicious looking (could be a spammer or bot registration, but not convincing enough to ban unless they do something), is I have a usergroup on the forum called "Suspicious" that I put these users in.  The main difference between regular users and suspicious ones is that posts by suspicious users are queued for moderation, so if they post spam, it won't show up until a mod or admin (usually me) approves it.  I check users in the suspicious group more frequently, to see if they add links to their profile/signature, and if they use it for spam, I give them the boot, and submit them here as appropriate.

I also purge suspicious users if they are inactive for more than 90 days or so, to eliminate the majority of "sleepers."  I also purge users who don't confirm their email address to activate their account after 90 days.


Spam happens when greed meets stupidity.

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