Is it just me?

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niksun
 
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Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2008 9:59 pm

Is it just me?

Post by niksun »

Or does there seem to be an increasing amount of spam on this forum lately? Most BANNED spam seems to come from non-English speaking peeps. I wonder if asking posters to answer a simple question would squelch the problem...

magician13134
 
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Re: Is it just me?

Post by magician13134 »

The forum registration has a captcha and email verification, so I think it's people who register, then set the bots free. Or maybe no bots at all. There just needs to be some nice IP-banning action going on.

niksun
 
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Re: Is it just me?

Post by niksun »

IPs can be spoofed. Maybe a captcha when posting.

koolkat
 
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Re: Is it just me?

Post by koolkat »

Wouldn't that eventually irritate some people? (besides spammers :) )

magician13134
 
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Re: Is it just me?

Post by magician13134 »

Yeah, that would just bug people, spammers only need to post 2 or 3 times, other people post all the time.
I don't really think spammers put THAT much effort into getting on. There's plenty of forums, when they're blocked from one, they'll just hit another

The_Don125
 
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Re: Is it just me?

Post by The_Don125 »

Is it possible to block posts containing certain words? I'm sure there are quite a few words or phrases that the spammers use in their postings that would never normally surface in normal discussion here.

magician13134
 
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Re: Is it just me?

Post by magician13134 »

That's pretty clever, but I haven't seen that option in phpbb. Maybe there's a plugin for it, though...

Fjornir
 
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Re: Is it just me?

Post by Fjornir »

I'd prefer captcha on every post to having to wade through a spam sewer.

niksun
 
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Re: Is it just me?

Post by niksun »

Fjornir wrote:I'd prefer captcha on every post to having to wade through a spam sewer.
I'm with you on that one...

niksun
 
Posts: 202
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Re: Is it just me?

Post by niksun »

The_Don125 wrote:Is it possible to block posts containing certain words? I'm sure there are quite a few words or phrases that the spammers use in their postings that would never normally surface in normal discussion here.
Back in the day when many people used Perl to handle message boards (forums), that was something popular. It's been mostly abandoned because of the many ways a word can be spelled (numbers for letters such as vi4gra, etc). IP-based filtering has become popular, but IPs can be easily spoofed by modifying packets. Plus, with most of the world running Winbloze as its operating system, the estimate is that a rather large number of them are compromised and are unsuspectingly being used to conceal the origin of attacks, spam, etc as part of botnets.

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Seamus
 
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Re: Is it just me?

Post by Seamus »

niksun wrote:
Fjornir wrote:I'd prefer captcha on every post to having to wade through a spam sewer.
I'm with you on that one...
Ditto on that, here.

I found this forum just a little while ago, and just in the last few weeks, it seems that the spam flooding has escalated significantly, from the odd posts for "power leveling" in online games (mostly from similarly-formed letter-and-number user names) to the recent flood from all directions for everything from fake designer BANNED to very graphic ads for BANNED sites. I typically try to make a point to at least browse every forum for new posts, but the spam and other garbage posts effectively "dilute" the forums of actual content, and as a result, I find myself more and more frequently just scanning the topics, wondering if the threads with new posts actually have relevant new content, or if it's just more garbage to clutter up the boards and waste everyone's time.

The extra couple of seconds that it would take to fill out a captcha for every post probably wouldn't be that much of a deterrent to legitimate posts, really, and if it has any chance of getting rid of the noise - especially the recent cluster of very graphic BANNED ads - I'm all for it.

eil
 
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Joined: Sun Aug 31, 2008 11:09 pm

Re: Is it just me?

Post by eil »

I like reCAPTCHA. Keep spammers at bay and proofread old books at the same time!

Certainly preferable to content filtering, which is problematic at best and censorship at worst.

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amberwolf
 
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Re: Is it just me?

Post by amberwolf »

I *would* like to see some sort of spam-reduction system in place, since cutting off the hands of those doing the spamming (or initiating the bots that do it) is probably illegal or something. ;)

I'd prefer reCAPTCHA to anything else, as content filtering A) is difficult to implement at best, and B) will cause other problems, as people try to post normal things that happen to use combinations of characters that are recognized (incorrectly or not) as banned.

I regularly hear from companies I am contacting for various kinds of support or questions that they found a message of mine in their spam filters (after it has been several months and I have long forgotten or cared that I ever tried to reach them), or I get an autoreply from their filters that my message was blocked as spam or as undeliverable due to improper content, when no such content or spam was present in the message, but it thought there was due to the way it's filters worked. One example was a paragraph that ended and next began like this:

"...this app.

Or now that I...."

What the filter killed the message for was the word "BANNED", which was NOT in the message, but it saw it there by taking out the ".", the carriage-return and line-feed, and the space. I figured it out by attempting to resend it over and over again with different paragraphs cut out until I found the right one, then started looking closely at it until I saw this. I spelled out "application" and it then went thru. :roll:

I've had this kind of thing happen many times even in normal sentences, where I used some abbreviation that, in conjunction with a preceding or following word, happens to make some banned word in their filters, even though there are spaces between. It is quite difficult to figure out why a message won't post or won't go thru, since most of the time there is simply no indication that it didn't go thru in the first place--it's rare to be told it bounced due to filtration.


As for PHPBBv3.x having filters, it must have the option available somehow, as there is at least one forum I'm on that as soon as he changed to v3, the word "Youtube", in any form, is blocked, even in PMs/etc. Nothing else, as far as I have been able to determine, just that word. So if you put it as "you tube", or "y o u t u b e", or any variant thereof, it will be replaced with "..." or similar. Thus all Youtube links will be broken and must be manually repaired when clicked, and discussing the site requires abbreviating it YT or EweToob, or something like that. :)

Fjornir
 
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Re: Is it just me?

Post by Fjornir »

Content filtering is, in general, a bad idea. It is too easy to implement badly and too hard to implement correctly and even done right it fails in a number of ways:

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