Spam Problem

My message board is getting flooded with spam - I looked through the messages/admin panel to see if I can get the users ip address and block him with my .htaccess file. No luck - does anyone else have any alternatives to this problem??

Thanks in advance!

*self-deleted*



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/24/2018 05:38PM by Voltius.

When users sign up, I manually approve them, after checking their email and ip at [www.stopforumspam.com] (which by the way, could/may be automated for an ambitious developer).

I also use and check the event logging module for really short times between registering and attempting to log in, if I suddenly get a bunch of registrations.

Interesting Scott! I didn't know about that website. How well does this work for you. Is it a substantial amount of users that you block using this? If it is, it could be a good addition for the spam hurdles module.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

Maurice,

580 users in 12 years, so I only get a few legitimate registrations a month. I reject 15 to 50 spam registrations a month based on stopforumspam.com.

You do need to check the email and the ip as separate searches.

Thanks, that sounds quite useful. I'll put it on my todo list for Spam Hurdles!

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

If you are planning on automating it, there are many resources available on their website, scripts, down loadable lists. An api key for adding to their list. Too many hits an you get banned. Check the Resources menu, and their Forum.

Sounds like a great idea. I've never heard about that site before. I think a separate module would be best.

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Thomas Seifert

Hello, I found this thread searching to see if any stopforumspam.com integration had already been done, it looks quite useful and dealing with spammers (even after implementing registration captchas and other methods) every day is getting very tiresome

This thread is the only mention I could find, has a module been developed already or has support been added to Spam Hurdles?

If not, I will start writing a new module in a few weeks (after my eyes heal from surgery)

On first glance I suppose the mod configuration would be something like this:
- option to block or manually approve registration from spam IPs
- option to block or manually approve posts from spam IPs
- site specific API key
- reporting feature back to stopforumspam.com? maybe not for v0.1

Edit: actually checking each post would be overkill, just check on registration.

Thanks,
Skye

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Skye Nott
Corvus Digital



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/13/2011 04:15PM by Skye.

No, no work has been done on this yet.

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Thomas Seifert

Checking each post would be overkill, unless IP's can be registered as spammy after a user has registered. This happening is a quite basic scenario I guess. Therefore, it would not be overkill to check at posting time too. What could be useful, is a local caching mechanism for recently looked up IP's, so you won't have to check remotely a lot for busy users.

And good luck with the healing process!

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

Maybe the best approach would be to check each post for a user's first N posts, or for N days after they register (although I have found linkspammers that registered months ago, never post, and then suddenly start spamming - so perhaps the former method is more useful). Once they have posted 10 or 20 times and passed, they can probably be trusted. If they fail the SFS check more than X times (default 1), their account is marked disabled.

Ironic that forum linkspam is getting so bad now, when Google's Panda ranking algo has made that approach basically worthless months ago. I guess the spammers didn't get the memo.

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Skye Nott
Corvus Digital

Speaking of spam problems... I'm back home and will start working on this plugin soon. I already have a working version for my custom CMS, I just need to make it into a Phorum module.

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Skye Nott
Corvus Digital

I had this problem a few months ago. I wrote a small module that checks it IP address at httpBL.abuse.ch for known forum spam sources. If there's a hit, the module also syslogs the event and I have fail2ban configured to block the address based on that log entry.

The module could use some more work to make it pretty. But it does the job for me.

It's also a good idea to log failed logins. Then use fail2ban to block IP addresses that have been trying to hack into accounts.

As I needed it for one of my projects I put together a first version of a stopforumspam module.
See [www.phorum.org] .

Sorry Skye, I just needed it right now.

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Thomas Seifert



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/28/2011 12:43PM by Thomas Seifert.