Spammers

Hello all,

The spammers have been pounding us hard lately. Drupal (the website software) is very good at blocking spammers, but there’s no sure defense - if we tried that none of you could get in either. So we have to take our chances and clean out the spammers as they come. I’ve been monitoring actual IP addresses for a while now, and I’ve gathered a list of over 320 addresses that are blocked. 130 of those in the last three days. Lot of time sunk into the cleanup. I may have to analyze the data and close off whole blocks of IPs. Many of these are from Russia and China.

I do the IP cleaning by hand to ensure that no legitimate members get blocked. However if you repeatedly try to log into a non-existing account and never a real account, I am likely to block your IP. What should you do to prevent this? Nothing! Just act normal and don’t post spam, and you’re fine. If you ever find that your IP has been blocked (you will get a specific message), please contact me immediately, and I will look into the problem.

So when you see the occasional spammer slip past us and post nonsense at 3am in the morning, you know that he’s gone as soon as I see him the next morning. Don’t post comments on the junk thread, it will be deleted.

If the storm gets much worse I may have to tighten the restrictions on new members. This is not about you - we welcome legitimate posts. But we will not tolerate spam.

hi chris
yea i saw the spam but i wouldn’t legitamize by replying
It’s a shame those folks don’t have real jobs
see ya
BTW good site not really much span compared to some
Tom

Chris, All though I’ve seen some spam It’s not much. You do an amazing job with this site. Keep up the good work I know a lot of folks here appreciate it.

Chris, i think your doing an excellent job keeping the spam down. matter of fact until last week i don’t think i have seen any. keep up the good work it is appreiciated

Hi Chris, considering that we are a small niche hobby, unlike the catch all social networks that abound, what do you think they are entertained by coming after this site?

Hi Doug,

Its not about us. The same folks are spamming thousands of sites daily, looking for weaknesses, trying to post link spam, watching for email addresses to harvest. The only thing you can say is that we’re finally on the internet’s radar screen. All in all I guess that’s a good thing… Try some gasifier searches, we come up fairly high, which is great. The price you pay for visibility is dealing with spam.

Here’s a neat site I found that lists some of the top spammers, as reported by their members. http://stopforumspam.com They claim to have 31 million spammers in their database. So its no surprise some of them show up here occasionally. Actually if I can harness that database using a website plugin, I may have an easier time of it…

Chris, between answering questions on the site and fighting the invaders, you really adopted a needy child. Thank you for the shop keeping.

Hi Chris Saenz
Time to BAN this kai la person. Second time now putting up trash. And always early East Coast NA AM time. Clever. Show their is a human behind this to set up this pattern.
No one here even bother to open up and look at this non woodgas trash. You do - they win - got you to look.
And for gosh sakes do not PM this person - this will give them your direct E-Mail address.

Regards
Steve Unruh

Hi Steve,

Banned them both times. Account and content deleted, IP permanently banned. This is a “different” spammer, as far as the system is concerned.

I can’t ban by username, only by IP address. Most spammers don’t reuse names anyway, too risky. If they change their IP the system can’t tell that they’ve already been blocked.

I am investigating modules that will auto-ban known spam IPs from blacklists around the world. Until then, please be patient, the spam can only stay online for 7-8 hours overnight at most (while I sleep!)

If you get online before I do then you will see some spam occasionally. It will be gone when I arrive.

Hello everyone,

You will see some CAPTCHAs (letter puzzles) in new places, mostly on posting forum topics or blogposts. This is temporary until we get the problem under control. Thanks!

Spam attack again this evening. If you see spam posts, don’t reply to them or follow any of their links. I will delete them as soon as I see them.