SMF forum here; http://socialnetroar.com/Forum/index.php
Full of suck and fail (spammerz!) Any advice for a long term solution?
Ban the spammers. Where spammers come from countries that you would not expect to be forum members, ban them based on domain names, or even entire countries (Macedonia and the Philippines come to mind, as prolific spammers). Verfiy users before allowing them to sign up - putting the name or email into google may reveal they are a spammer, via sites like BotScout and StopForumSpam, or may reveal bot-like behaviour, such as signing up to hundreds of forums in the space of a few days, making no posts on any of them.
Thank you. I'm off do that but I'll also point out my tech literacy is low so any and all advice is helpful.
If I ban an ip am i risking cutting off legit users?
Yes, but for the most part, legit commercial services should be banning spammers from using their service in the first place. Big companies, like Sky, BT, Comcast, Roadrunner and so on crack down hard on spammers, and so there should never be a reason to ban them.
Does SMF have a feature with which you can ban account + delete all of its posts in one go? If not there's bound to be a plugin/extension for SMF to do so.
Seconding Cains suggestions, especially setting account registration to manual approval.
Another idea--you say you're not very technical but it might be very easy to do I just haven't tried yet--is an idea I had for PD registration. Simply an additional text field where the new applicant has to write 1-2 paragraphs of something or other. A cupcake recipe. A haiku. A very short story. Hysterical swearing at everything (last one may also help to filter bigots).
I can't see spammers bothering to write anything original.
Bonus points if whatever they wrote is set as their initial signature :lol:
Quote from: Triple Zero on February 07, 2012, 01:19:38 PM
Does SMF have a feature with which you can ban account + delete all of its posts in one go?
The previous allowed you to delete an account and all its posts in one go - if it also integrated banning, it would be perfect. I haven't deleted anyone on the most current version, so I don't know if it has been improved yet at all.
I'm pretty much giving up becaue I can find no way to mass ban members (I have over 1600 pages o members). I'm thinking I'll burn it it the ground, then replace it. Which does involve navigating hostgator control panels, but I'll see how that goes. Thank you both.
wow.
and how many of those would be real?
did the forum have many useful posts or did it get spammed into oblivion before it got properly started?
The latter.
Afaik I'm the only human :(
Turn on registration to manual approval.
Delete all members except yourself.
Watch as members sign up - google their email and their username. Check their host id as well (use http://www.ip-adress.com/ip_tracer/ to check if the host id is not visible). If they look legit based on all the above criterea, approve them.
Is there a fast way to delete everyone one? Because atm it looks like I need to go through every page of members to do so.
Admin page - Members - view all members
There should be a box on the far right. Select them all. At the bottom, there should be an option to delete all selected members.
It's not as useful as a "prune all" option, but this way you can do a page's worth of members at a time, instead of one by one.
Quote from: Cain on February 07, 2012, 02:04:59 PM
Admin page - Members - view all members
There should be a box on the far right. Select them all. At the bottom, there should be an option to delete all selected members.
It's not as useful as a "prune all" option, but this way you can do a page's worth of members at a time, instead of one by one.
Yep I've found that.
It's just that 1600 pages is still a pretty long process, especially on my Internet speed.
can you tell us more about your forum, dingo?
If you want technical details I'm really pretty lImited in what I know other than it's a simple machines forum.
In terms of purpose it's part of a project called Social NetROAR (www.socialnetroar.com) where I encourage a community to step out of a social networking site (or whatever they find themselves simply occupied by) and put that time towards a creative project.
I made it in December, went to Vietnam and forgot about it, planning to promote it in Feb for March. Then yesterday I was like ofuk, it's February. And then I saw I had 1600 pages of bots spagging things up.
I don't want to press the help me! thing too much because I know it's a pain for technical minds to be harassed by the non-technical but if anyone is willing to help me navigate smf and/or the hostgator systems please pm me.
Capcha does nothing. I've set it up so members need approval but I'm getting seriously 10 new members for approval a minute.
Quote from: Placid Dingo on February 08, 2012, 08:51:01 AM
Capcha does nothing. I've set it up so members need approval but I'm getting seriously 10 new members for approval a minute.
Add one of those questions that force the user to add words or whatever. Make it hard for a machine to process (ie not a mathematical equation). What I put up here is a link to the first page of the principia which has the word Introduction on the top.
The question is "what is the word located on the top of this page:" followed by a link.
Awesome. I'll have a hunt for that. Is it a SMF mod or just an available option?
Quote from: Placid Dingo on February 08, 2012, 09:00:03 AM
Awesome. I'll have a hunt for that. Is it a SMF mod or just an available option?
For SMF 1.x it is a mod, for 2.0 it's built in as default.
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but doesn't pretty much any custom security work? Everyone is using ReCapcha, so the bots are programmed to handle that, but if you invent anything yourself (answer a custom question; detect if javascript is running and they scrolled to the bottom of the registration page; forcing them to submit, press back, and submit again; anything that's original and not just downloaded from the top 10 SMF plugins) they probably won't be bothered to adjust their bots to your anti-spam measure.
Then again, this advise is probably completely impractical for someone who is not technical.
Quote from: el sjaako on February 08, 2012, 10:09:39 AM
Then again, this advise is probably completely impractical for someone who is not technical.
It doesn't really have to be anything to complex, like the question method I used that forces the user to check another page for the obvious keyword, that didn't really require any code at all.
Quote from: Faust on February 08, 2012, 10:19:00 AM
Quote from: el sjaako on February 08, 2012, 10:09:39 AM
Then again, this advise is probably completely impractical for someone who is not technical.
It doesn't really have to be anything to complex, like the question method I used that forces the user to check another page for the obvious keyword, that didn't really require any code at all.
Updating/adding mods to smf (or doing anything to it at all at this point from outside the forum itself) is currently beyond me, but I'm trying to teach myself and not doing too badly.
I have managed to prevent spammers spamming, begun banning and deleting bots, and prevented new bots successfully registering.
So the mod will happen. Just maybe not fast. I'm going to put back the intended start date to April and do it from March next year.
Quote from: el sjaako on February 08, 2012, 10:09:39 AM
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but doesn't pretty much any custom security work? Everyone is using ReCapcha, so the bots are programmed to handle that, but if you invent anything yourself (answer a custom question; detect if javascript is running and they scrolled to the bottom of the registration page; forcing them to submit, press back, and submit again; anything that's original and not just downloaded from the top 10 SMF plugins) they probably won't be bothered to adjust their bots to your anti-spam measure.
Then again, this advise is probably completely impractical for someone who is not technical.
There's actually also human spammers these days.
Some are just Blackhat SEO spammers with a "DIY" persuasion, and then there's the outsourced grunts hired via underground variants of Amazon's Mechanical Turk and such. Probably the same types from which you can buy credit to solve a 1000 CAPTCHAs for $1 (also done by humans in 3rd world countries).
That mod is in! Thank you :)
The whole project is going to be shift to May so I can try to flog it across March and April and still ignore it a little on school holidays.
Wanting a mod that will kill off my several thousand spammers. Cant find one so trying to work out how to upgrade to 2.0.