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Thread: The Board is being spammed.

  1. #1

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    Member BadJasper's Avatar
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    Angry The Board is being spammed.

    Some losers with no life are spamming the boards. Can we get an admin to take care of this?
    I fear not the darkness for I am the Reaper who owns the night.

    Semper Fi!

  2. #2
    Super Moderator si_the_geek's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Thread moved to 'Forum Feedback', which is where site issues and questions about site usage etc belong

    I've deleted lots (hopefully all) of the spam that has been posted today.

    While lots of spam doesn't ever become visible, some does, and unfortunately how quickly it gets removed is a matter of timing due to moderators being volunteers.


    Thanks to you (and others) who reported the spam to us by clicking on the triangle at the bottom of posts.
    Note that you only need to do it for one post per spammer (by default we remove all of their posts), any more is just wasting your time.

  3. #3
    Smooth Moperator techgnome's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    If what does get through doesn't constitute most... then there's a ship load ton... the last few days it's been really bad. To the point where I come close to giving up coming back. and then today, at least one of the posts broke the site, causing only half of it to load, if that much.

    problem is when we get hit here, we get hit hard...

    -tg
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  4. #4

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    Smile Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Quote Originally Posted by techgnome View Post
    If what does get through doesn't constitute most... then there's a ship load ton... the last few days it's been really bad. To the point where I come close to giving up coming back. and then today, at least one of the posts broke the site, causing only half of it to load, if that much.

    problem is when we get hit here, we get hit hard...

    -tg
    Maybe it would be a good idea to have Admins or Mods to approve new membership requests. I know it would be a pain but, I've come to love this site for it's lack of spammers and the help it provides. And I'm sure new members would appreciate it too.

    On a side note, some of the sites I have up were constantly getting hammered. It got to the point where I actually blocked the IP's from whole countries. I know with VB Forums being a help site, it wouldn't want to be something that admins would want to do but, if you find you are getting hit by countries like China all the time, it would be easier to block the whole lot of them. Especially if there are no actual active members from that country. Just a thought.
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  5. #5
    Administrator Steve R Jones's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Approving membership is an option but odds are we won't go there. It's way to much work and we have so little info to go on it wouldn't help much.

    We do have many filters in place that include banning IP's and IP ranges... Disposable email addresses from several sites are blocked... Can't go into to much detail...

    The rest is left up to us humans. That's were everyone can help by using the REPORT option. It sends emails out and help get our attention when we aren't here.
    Wi-fi went down for five minutes, so I had to talk to my family....They seem like nice people.

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    Super Moderator FunkyDexter's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    I wouldn't like the idea of approving members. I'm not so much bothered by the extra work it would involve but I feel it would make the forum seem less friendly to new members. That's a more important consideration to me. Canning the spam can be a chore but I still prefer it to the alternative.

    We are indeed getting hit by a bucket load of spam at the moment but it's not representative of the usual state of things. We're probably getting more spammers a day at the moment than we would normally see in a fortnight so you guys are going to be seeing much more of it before we manage to squash it. I know Steve and Brad are tweaking some of the screening measures behind the scenes so we should see the volume drop off again soon.

    In the meantime, thanks for the reports - they help more than you probably realise.
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    After tonight I think the biggest question is why anyone who posts that opy01whatever.com site isn't autobanned, since the bot keeps posting the same site for the past several weeks now. The second biggest question is how garbage-character filled posts don't trip the filter either.

    If you don't want to be too heavy handed you could put people tripping more restrictive filters into a mod-approves-post category pending human review.

  8. #8
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    This site's moderation policy is directly to blame for a lot of this.

    The Terms of Use here need to be updated to explicitly state that web scraping is not a permissable topic at all, period, full stop. Then any reports of such should result in moderation that goes beyond locking the thread since in many cases foolish members have already provided aid and comfort to the scrape kiddie, and subsequent deviants will just find the information later. These threads need to be whacked, i.e. entirely removed.

    Just like password cracking help requests, "but, but I have permission" and "it is only for scraping my own site" are not legitimate excuses even when true (which they seldom are). The problem is that more scrape kiddies end up here getting assistance when they find these threads via search engines.

    Anyone with a legitimate need for such techniques can pretty trivially figure them out on their own anyway. We're only helping the bored malcontent still living in Mom's basement with a PC they have no real uses for and no cash to buy more vidiot games right now.

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    Super Moderator FunkyDexter's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    After tonight I think ...
    All good suggestion but I don't know how feasible they would be to implement. The forum software has it's feature set and I think we're pretty much limited to just that set. There are certainly the skills amongst the user base to implement everything you suggested and I think we did used to have a heavily modded instance but I think that was also the reason for a lot of the issues they had when they upgrade the software a year or so back - I'm not sure how keen Brad wouldbe to go down that path again.

    Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and perhaps there is scope for some modding. I hope I'm wrong because many of the things you've suggested would help alot.

    The Terms of Use here need to be updated to explicitly state that web scraping is not a permissable topic at all, period, full stop.
    I'm personally loathe to outright ban any topic of conversation. There are circumstances in which it's legitimate to scrape a web site and I wouldn't want to stop someone getting help when their purpose is legitimate.

    I do agree, though, that the instances of legitimate questions for help with scraping are rarer than a principled politican and I do groan when I see those questions getting answered unchallenged. I don't think we need to roll out the red carpet to these guys.

    Personally, I want the forum to have a culture where we all treat such questions with a healthy level of suspicion. If it's a new poster who doesn't say which site they're trying to scrape or why then politely challenge them. Dig a little and make sure they're legit or just hit the report button and let us mods do the digging. On the other hand, if you see a seasoned member of the forum who's got plenty of legitimate posting history and is citing a site who'se Ts and Cs allow it then by all means give 'em a hand.
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    I have to disagree.

    Even if a reputable member asks for password cracking assiatance, game cheats, etc. and even if we know he isn't up to no-good... any help given is available to every aspiring blackhat who finds the thread in a web search. The same thing goes for web scraping, SMTP, and other suspicious and risky topics.

    And while I'm whinging, I'll add discussions about proxy servers to the list of "no fly zone" topics.

  11. #11
    Super Moderator FunkyDexter's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    That's true and I'd generally recommend people take anything too sensitive "off line" into pms etc.

    The trouble is that the list of topics that could be used for hacking is vast and there's no obvious place to draw the line. Some topics e.g. sql injection, password cracking etc. are pretty clearly hacking and I wouldn't want to see a demonstration of how to do it on the forum, ever. Other topics e.g. how do I search for and delete a named file do get asked by hackers but also have many, many legitimate uses. And then there everything in between that has occasional legit uses but can also be hacking red flags.

    If we start banning topics from one end, I fear we would go through a gradual process that ended with the board being overly restricted in the topics we allowed. I think having the more experienced members do a little policing and making judicious use of the report button is pretty healthy andmostly gets the desired result, though I do see some threads slip through that I'd have closed if I'd got to them earlier. There are a few senior members (who I won't list but since you're posting I will say that it includes you) who are being a huge help in this and for which I throw out a personal and hearty "thank you". Keep challenging these threads when you see them. Keep hitting the report button. And also, bear in mind that us mods aren't hackers ourselves and may not recognise or understand a threat when we see it so the more info you can give us the better.

    That said, this is just my personal opinion and not a mod stance. We don't really have a moderation policy on this except what it say in the Terms of Use (which paraphrases to "don't ask about anything illegal") but I'm open to taking it to the mods if there's a hunger for it from the board as a whole. What do people think? Are we too lenient? Are we too strict? Are there specific topics we should be going after or should we have a more generalised policy? Chime in if you have an opinion.
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    In an ideal world I'd leave everything open to discussion. Knowledge is power.

    But with great power comes great responsibility, to coin a phrase. Name:  spidey.png
Views: 343
Size:  400 Bytes

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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    The same user has been spamming for 4 hours so far tonight and is still not banned.

    Until this issue abates, would site admins consider creating a class of moderator with permission only to move the spam flood threads to a hidden forum pending deletion by actual staff? And even better, permission to move the flooder to at least a user group requiring post approval. I check the forums very often and would be happy to help (and have extensive experience administering vbulletin).
    When spammers find their threads gone and their accounts blocked sufficiently quickly, they are likely to think not enough people see their threads to justify the efforts.

    ----
    Also, I don't think the people asking about spammy topics are going to turn around and be the ones spamming this site. And things are pretty strict here already... I've seen threads closed and people accused of hacking questions for topics that clearly have legitimate uses, without even attempting to clarify their use case. The bottom line is there are precisely zero topics that have absolutely no legitimate uses, and if malice is suspected it should be confirmed before restricting speech. Let's face it, anyone capable of causing actual damage isn't going to be here asking for help with VB. Anyone asking for help with something illegal/evil here is almost certainly going to be on the level where it's easy to determine their motivation.
    And proxies??? With all the censorship and web blocking going on in the world today, using proxies is a very important topic and the presumption should absolutely not be bad.

    Edit: And I'm not sure what the exact definition of 'scraping' is, but I suspect ignoring robots.txt and copying everything on a site counts, and right now people are quite happy that I've gone ahead and done that on other VB sites (at least 2 major VB sites I've copied everything from have disappeared since I started doing it, preventing some of the best sample code ever written being gone forever). WinHTTrack is pretty much the best for that, and it still has major issues. If I asked for help writing my own, should I not be able to receive it? Just one example of something mostly used for bad, but has important legit uses. Nothing should be banned outright.

    PS- I'm refering to general topics, obviously if someone asks 'help me implement this 0-day sql injection' it's not legit.
    Last edited by fafalone; Dec 12th, 2015 at 02:11 AM.

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    Super Moderator FunkyDexter's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    The same user has been spamming for 4 hours so far tonight and is still not banned.
    Yeah, it is getting frustrating but it looks like Si go to him eventually. The problem is that 4 hours really isn't that long a period for there to be no Mod active on the site. When we come on we pretty much deal with it straight away but sometimes they've managed to create a flood in the meantime. Although there are quite a few users who carry the mod title, most aren't active and there's really only a handful of us that are on here regularly. In the past it's been enough but the level of spam has shot up over the last month or so and it seems to almost exclusively have the same source.

    would site admins consider creating a class of moderator with permission only to move the spam flood threads to a hidden forum pending deletion by actual staff?
    That seems like a pretty good suggestion to me. I guess the only downside would be that such a demi-mod could also go power crazy and start moving non spam threads just because they didn't like them but that's probably unlikely. There are lots of members who have enough track record to demonstrate that they're reasonable people for us to pull from.

    I've seen threads closed and people accused of hacking questions for topics that clearly have legitimate uses
    I think that's probably most commonly me, particularly where scraping is concerned. However, I always try and search out the terms of service that are relevant to the site being scraped before I take any action. If no site is mentioned I'll challenge the poster and try to ascertain the target site before taking any action. Where it turns out a target site does not prohibit scraping I'm happy for the thread to get left open and to be answered. Those rarely seem to be the sites that people want to scrape though - mainly because they tend to be smaller sites run by hobbyists and tend not to have as much valuable intellectual property on them that the owner would want to protect. Everyone wants to scrape YouTube and Facebook.

    I think those users asking questions that break some third party's Ts and Cs generally fall into 3 categories: those who didn't realise, those who didn't care and those who are actively trying to do something they shouldn't. I do have considerable sympathy for the first category but I still think the only responsible course of action for us to take is to point out that it violates the Ts and Cs and end the discussion. Needless to say I have little sympathy for the second category and none at all for the third.

    Just to be clear, it's not the act of scraping that's wrong. What's wrong is breaking a third parties Ts and Cs and scraping happens to be the most common way people do that - or at least, it's the most common way being asked about. If you're scraping without breaking anyone's Ts and Cs then you can have at it as far as I'm concerned.

    The same applies to other activities. There's nothing wrong with working behind a proxy but what's wrong is the activities people tend to engage in while doing so. There's nothing wrong with trying to generate gazillion random strings but it would be wrong to use it to try and brute force crack a password (although this one is comedically funny to watch people try). It's not wrong to want your application to run without a presence on the desktop but hoping that it will run without the user even being aware of it's presence... well you're into shady territory on that one. Generally a single thread from a user on such a topic will go without comment but they never limit themselves to a single thread. There's always a bunch of threads and the picture that builds up is usually pretty obvious.
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Sorry if something like this were already said. Isn't possible to force a "captcha" before posting for new members? Lets say, one need to make 10 posts in no less than 10 days to not need to fill the captcha.

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    Super Moderator FunkyDexter's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    It's a good suggestion. I'll post it in the mods area and see if they think it's a possibility.
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    Fanatic Member namrekka's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Or limit the post frequency of "new members".

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    ex-Administrator brad jones's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Quote Originally Posted by Carlos Rocha View Post
    Sorry if something like this were already said. Isn't possible to force a "captcha" before posting for new members? Lets say, one need to make 10 posts in no less than 10 days to not need to fill the captcha.
    Many captchas don't really work as well with spammers as you would expect. They do stop a few basic bots, but fall short of stopping everything. Usually the spammers that hit us hardest are able to get around them.

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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Quote Originally Posted by brad jones View Post
    Many captchas don't really work as well with spammers as you would expect. They do stop a few basic bots, but fall short of stopping everything. Usually the spammers that hit us hardest are able to get around them.
    I understand that. And what about hide the very first post until it is reviewed?

  20. #20
    Super Moderator si_the_geek's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    That would hurt genuine new members, so it is something we'd rather avoid.

    We are discussing various options in private (so the spammers can't read it, like they probably are with this thread), and should come up with something that will improve the current situation.

  21. #21
    Smooth Moperator techgnome's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Quote Originally Posted by Carlos Rocha View Post
    I understand that. And what about hide the very first post until it is reviewed?
    I thought this was already being done... the first couple of posts are supposed to be held in "moderation" until approved... problem is that it doesn't prevent someone (human or bot or not) from creating posts 3 through 457... which then do go through, and that's what we're seeing.

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  22. #22
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Techgnome - in short nope... Can't really go into in this public thread.
    Wi-fi went down for five minutes, so I had to talk to my family....They seem like nice people.

  23. #23
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Quote Originally Posted by techgnome View Post
    I thought this was already being done... the first couple of posts are supposed to be held in "moderation" until approved... problem is that it doesn't prevent someone (human or bot or not) from creating posts 3 through 457... which then do go through, and that's what we're seeing.

    -tg
    I think that actually turns out to be a big Catch-22 situation which can pretty much kill off a site.
    It sure seems logical and intuitive, but I think a first time poster who can't see their own thread, or get a response after a few hours would move on and not look back.
    The current deserted ghost town that xtremevbtalk is not sure seems to have begun is down slide in concert with the implementation of just such a policy. An unfortunate reality I think, that moderators can be scheduled to give 24 hr coverage and one minute turnaround time for every new user post.

    Though is does seem that since the post are suppose to be in English that all these Korean spams should be able to be rejected automatically just on that basis of very few English words in the title (which is a link so I don't click on them so don't even know what the contents look like), but I'm not a web programming person, so am just looking at this from a point of ignorance regarding the work involved really.
    Last edited by passel; Dec 14th, 2015 at 02:25 PM.

  24. #24

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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Quote Originally Posted by passel View Post
    I think that actually turns out to be a big Catch-22 situation which can pretty much kill off a site.
    It sure seems logical and intuitive, but I think a first time poster who can't see their own thread, or get a response after a few hours would move on and not look back.
    The current deserted ghost town that xtremevbtalk is not sure seems to have begun is down slide in concert with the implementation of just such a policy. An unfortunate reality I think, that moderators can be scheduled to give 24 hr coverage and one minute turnaround time for every new user post.

    Though is does seem that since the post are suppose to be in English that all these Korean spams should be able to be rejected automatically just on that basis of very few English words in the title (which is a link so I don't click on them so don't even know what the contents look like), but I'm not a web programming person, so am just looking at this from a point of ignorance regarding the work involved really.
    We could have the HTTP headers read and look for the culture of the post. That could take care of some of the Korean but, that would also be a double edge sword and block legitimate posters from those areas. You'd think with the current state of technology, we'd be able to come up with some kind of solution to put an end to these losers without blocking legit users. I guess it's time to put on the thinking cap.
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  25. #25
    ex-Administrator brad jones's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    We have a feature that we use as a front line of defense for spamming that I learned was not installed on this forum. I'm not sure how it didn't get installed a long time ago, and I'm SHOCKED we don't have a lot more spam on this forum as a result! As a note, the feature will block people/bots at the time they register and throw them into a moderation queue. We are getting this added. Let's see what that does for spam going forward.

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  26. #26
    ex-Administrator brad jones's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Quote Originally Posted by BadJasper View Post
    We could have the HTTP headers read and look for the culture of the post.
    We've done that for brief periods of heavy spamming on one of our other high-traffic forums. Spammers will get around it. Worse, in a big forum like that one (and this one), blocking anything at that level does block legitimate users. We don't want to do that.

    As per my previous post - let's see how our latest addition works.

    Brad!

  27. #27

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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Quote Originally Posted by brad jones View Post
    We've done that for brief periods of heavy spamming on one of our other high-traffic forums. Spammers will get around it. Worse, in a big forum like that one (and this one), blocking anything at that level does block legitimate users. We don't want to do that.

    As per my previous post - let's see how our latest addition works.

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  28. #28
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Is it just me for some reason, or are spam posts now breaking the forum pages? This is what VB6 looks like to me on both Firefox and Chrome right now (the blank thread is a spam thread like the ones we've been seeing):

    As the picture suggests, nothing appears below that, not even the page footer. If I go to page 2, the missing items don't show up there, just the normal page 2.
    Now I noted this in my report, but I'm not sure if it went through or went through correctly so I'll repeat it here...
    I could manually navigate to the thread by getting the showpost URL from the page source; it looks like a typical spam thread. But for some reason the report button was broken; it led to a blank page (and a blank page came up if I manually entered the report form URL with that post #). So I clicked report on another post and changed the details to the spam post's ID and URL and hopefully it went through, but this is bizarre.
    If it's the posts that are causing this display problem, I'd say the priority level just went up.

    All behavior reported was identical when viewed with Firefox and Chrome (I'm on Win7).

    Edit: The display went back to normal, but the report button still showed a blank page; then the thread was deleted. The other spam threads aren't having that effect right now; but this has happened several times over the past couple days;
    Last edited by fafalone; Dec 15th, 2015 at 03:24 AM.

  29. #29
    Super Moderator FunkyDexter's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Is it just me for some reason, or are spam posts now breaking the forum pages
    No, not just you. I'm not sure if it's the spam itself or some other software glitch but I get that on occasion too.

    then the thread was deleted
    That was probably a mod in action. Actually, our mod actions might be causing the rendering problem as well. The views of the pages don't all update synchronously (something to do with triggers running on a slight delay but I don't know the details) so our deleting posts might create a temporary inconsistency. Or it could be nothing to do with that at all, I'm just guessing.
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  30. #30
    ex-Administrator brad jones's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Agreed - page display issues are not related to the spamming issue. They are an issue all on their own.

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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Quote Originally Posted by si_the_geek View Post
    We are discussing various options in private (so the spammers can't read it, like they probably are with this thread), and should come up with something that will improve the current situation.
    No offense guys, but this is silly. vbForums is not being targeted by an elite state-sponsored hacking team. The spam is obviously automated, so you shouldn't obsess over "secret spam spies" reading your discussions. This kind of spam is universal across the Internet.

    Spambots that target vBulletin (especially older versions of it) are a dime-a-dozen, just like they're a dime-a-dozen for WordPress, Joomla, or any other large-scale CMS. You can rent them for pennies in the shadier corner of the Internet. All the bots do is crawl the web and look for vBulletin identifiers in webpages, like the meta tags this board uses (but really shouldn't!), e.g.:

    Code:
    <"meta name="generator" content="vBulletin 4.2.2" />
    Identifiers like that are like honey to spambots. Once a bot/crawler finds a vBulletin site, they park themselves, try everything they can to set up a user account (and if they fail repeatedly, they'll ask a human operator for momentary help), then once an account's set-up, they go crazy starting new threads with advertising links.

    The reason captcha (or even better, Google's reCAPTCHA) helps is not necessarily because of the difficulty of cracking the image analysis - it's because the captcha changes on each page refresh, and requires actual mouse+kb input to pass. So unlike this forum, where a human can type up a quick macro to deal with the not-actually-random "random questions" on the sign-up page, captcha forces a human bot operator to intervene on every new account sign-up, which makes the process way more tedious, slowing down the rate at which bots can sign up for accounts.

    Solutions to spam like this are well-known, and there are many automated solutions (like Akismet) that have been carefully honed over years of crowd-sourced data. You don't need to reinvent the wheel.
    Check out PhotoDemon, a pro-grade photo editor written completely in VB6. (Full source available at GitHub.)

  32. #32
    PowerPoster kfcSmitty's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Quote Originally Posted by Tanner_H View Post
    captcha forces a human bot operator to intervene on every new account sign-up, which makes the process way more tedious, slowing down the rate at which bots can sign up for accounts..
    Sorry, but that's completely false. reCAPTCHA (or any captcha system out there) has been broken time and time again and does not require a human to intervene on the bots behalf. You can Google to find that information, but here is a thread that lists more detail:

    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...efeated-broken

    I actually have better results on my forum using the questions-type system this site uses. Now I don't get anywhere near as much traffic as this site, but when I used reCAPTCHA I was seeing at least 1 spam post per day. Once I switched to "random" questions, I was getting spammed once a week or so. Sure, every couple months the bots catch on to the questions, but I simply switch them and then I'm good to go for another couple months.

  33. #33
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Quote Originally Posted by kfcSmitty View Post
    Sorry, but that's completely false. reCAPTCHA (or any captcha system out there) has been broken time and time again and does not require a human to intervene on the bots behalf. You can Google to find that information, but here is a thread that lists more detail:

    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...efeated-broken

    I actually have better results on my forum using the questions-type system this site uses. Now I don't get anywhere near as much traffic as this site, but when I used reCAPTCHA I was seeing at least 1 spam post per day. Once I switched to "random" questions, I was getting spammed once a week or so. Sure, every couple months the bots catch on to the questions, but I simply switch them and then I'm good to go for another couple months.
    Linking to a StackOverflow link from four years ago doesn't exactly help your case. Do you really think Google hasn't updated its algorithms since then?

    My point is simple: Google, Facebook, etc have WAY more resources to throw at anti-spam tools than a bunch of part-timers do. They have huge teams of expert coders dedicated to defeating these kinds of attacks.

    If you want to ignore their years of experience and research and come up with a home-brew system, that's fine, but you're just setting yourself up for future headaches, IMO.
    Check out PhotoDemon, a pro-grade photo editor written completely in VB6. (Full source available at GitHub.)

  34. #34
    PowerPoster kfcSmitty's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    While I don't deny your point, here are a few more articles you can read about it ranging from 2012-2015:

    http://arstechnica.com/security/2012...-to-its-knees/
    https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspo...echnology.html
    https://www.funcaptcha.com/2015/01/0...n-ever-before/

    I'd quip back to your

    Do you really think Google hasn't updated its algorithms since then?
    With, do you really think hackers/crackers haven't kept at it for the past 4 years?

    While I agree that the recent spam has been annoying, a captcha system is not a quick fix to the problem.

  35. #35
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Thank you for the links, kfcSmitty, but you're not the only one who follows security news. I work in the medical software industry, writing software like machine learning algorithms that can be taught to read doctor's handwriting - the same kinds of algorithms that can be taught to crack reCAPTCHA text. I'm well aware of the ever-escalating arms race to try and prevent spam via "bot-unfriendly" techniques, with all the pros and cons solutions like reCAPTCHA entail.

    No one's saying reCAPTCHA is the ONLY solution (or a PERFECT solution). But it's an easy, proven, additional layer of security you can drop into place in seconds. Preventing spam is all about multiple layers of prevention, and any system that is constantly updated and improved by teams of security experts is going to yield better results than a recycled list of static, pseudo-random questions - questions that only need to be broken once before they are added to a whitelist that bots can reuse ad infinitum.

    (Again, there's a reason that companies like Google - who deal with trillions of spam hits a day across a huge variety of services - don't use silly little questions as a primary spam-prevention device.)

    Ideally, you'd want a system like reCAPTCHA as a first layer, then a whole bunch of other layers (akismet, email verification, time limits on post frequency for new accounts, etc) to catch whatever slips through. The more layers, the better, although it's obviously hard to find a balance between encouraging legitimate new members and discouraging spam.

    Again, all types of security are an arms race between the good guys and the bad guys. It doesn't mean that you write off all existing solutions as bad ones, simply because bad guys outsmart it given enough time. (Or have outsmarted it in the past.) By that logic, we should never use any anti-spam tools, because they've all been broken before, and their updated versions will all be broken eventually.
    Check out PhotoDemon, a pro-grade photo editor written completely in VB6. (Full source available at GitHub.)

  36. #36
    Super Moderator FunkyDexter's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    At the moment we use questions rather than Captcha but I doubt either is likely to provide a quick solution in this case. From the pattern of behaviour I'm seeing I suspect human intervention is being used to get past the initial questions and the subsequent spam is, of course, automated. While either technique is tricky (not impossible) for an automation to bypass, the amount of human intervention required to bypass either technique is trivial so switching from one to the other is unlikely to have an impact.

    I also doubt that we're being specifically targeted, we've just ended up on a "breakable" list and we're being churned through it.

    What I do know is that the site admins are looking at various options to help resolve it. Whether that's a matter of tweaking the mechanisms we've already got, applying new mechanisms, having the mods more active to quash the stuff that gets through... they're open to all of it. I think we're unlikely to start coding our own measures as plenty of solutions already exist. I guess it's a possibility if we'd exhausted all other avenues but it doesn't seem like a sensible use of our time and I very much doubt we'd get to that stage.

    In the meantime all we can really ask for is your patience. We get that seeing swathes of spam push your favourite threads off the front page is frustrating and us lowly, non-techy mods are working pretty hard at the moment to try and keep things as clear as we can. Please bear with us.
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  37. #37
    ex-Administrator brad jones's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Quote Originally Posted by Tanner_H View Post
    Preventing spam is all about multiple layers of prevention,
    Quote Originally Posted by Tanner_H View Post
    it's obviously hard to find a balance between encouraging legitimate new members and discouraging spam.
    Quote Originally Posted by FunkyDexter View Post
    What I do know is that the site admins are looking at various options to help resolve it.
    We have 20 forums of which several are big and one is a bigger magnet to spammers than this one. Yes, we are and have looked into various options.

    Quote Originally Posted by FunkyDexter View Post
    I think we're unlikely to start coding our own measures as plenty of solutions already exist.
    Correct - there are better people to code solutions. We use a third party software product (vBulletin), so we also have to make sure what we use works now and in the future to make upgrading easier (again, we have 20 forums to maintain).

    Quote Originally Posted by FunkyDexter View Post
    In the meantime all we can really ask for is your patience.
    I echo that - patience is appreciated.

    Our moderators and admins are usually fantastic at eradicating spam about as quick as it gets posted. There are times this doesn't happen as quick as we'd all like, but in general we keep up. There are times one of our forum gets extra attention from the spammers. We just went through this on our WebDeveloper.com forum. During those times, it is a front-line battle. We find if we fight the battle, it usually subsides after a week or two. As stated by someone before, most members of this forum would be amazed if not shocked if we turned off all efforts and let the average daily amount of spam simply flow for awhile. Of course, we aren't going to do that!

    We are adding more layers. Captcha might eventually come back as well. We want to try other options too.

    I'll end this post by saying it is great to have so many members that care and that have differing opinions. That's one of the things that makes VBForums and some of our other forums great. I don't see the type of community input and involvement on a lot of other forums.

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  38. #38
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    Just wanted to add my own THANK YOU to everyone working on fixing this. A lot of us have dealt with similar issues on our own websites, so if you need an extra "pair of hands", don't hesitate to ask!
    Check out PhotoDemon, a pro-grade photo editor written completely in VB6. (Full source available at GitHub.)

  39. #39
    Administrator Steve R Jones's Avatar
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    We just went through this on our WebDeveloper.com forum. During those times, it is a front-line battle.
    As I recall, the biggest spammer I found had 839 new threads. Zapping 40 at a time isn't fun....but a necessary evil.

  40. #40
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    Re: The Board is being spammed.

    I think it's getting serious. Only my opinion, but why would a new member be able to create more than 1 thread? I think something should be possible at this level without harming legit members.

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