What's Become Of Audioforums...

[desmond11]

Post deleted by admin

[Sonic]

Man, In the 7 years or so I've been here there's not been this much spam. It's to the point where I rarely come here. What's happened? Audiodude, did you super relax the registration process cause this is getting out of hand dude.

[howie15]

thank you for bringing this up Sonic. It goes through waves and switches off: porn to cheap wireless crap back to porn to free drugs, etc.

Howie J

[sabianq]

so which truck did these fall off of?

i say we make a new policy:

Ban Users That Spam

[Audiodude]

That's actually a very old policy. Spam once, and you (and your IP address, and your email address) will be banned for life.

[Audiodude]

We've actually made the registration process a lot more stringent. We just get a LOT of spam. I've been the admin here for about 3-4 months, and it has more than tripled in that time. I spend at least 30 minutes every day just deleting it and banning the users responsible, a lot more some days (like today).

Today, for example (at only 10:00 AM so far) over 20 threads have been deleted and as many spambots have been banned and their IP addresses blocked.

[sabianq]

nice!

i like it..

[sabianq]

I have been getting weird spam at my work e-mail, it seems like someone wrote a script that makes up random e-mail accounts and then emails whole lists of emails by alphabet. these emails are weather and stock information.( its not like they are trying to sell you anything, they just seem to be there to be annoying) i have no idea how they infiltrated the Name@governmentagency.gov address but they seemed do it quite easily.

[Audiodude]

Okay... I've spent the last couple of hours working on this, and I banned an additional 50 or so users that had registered using the same IP address as a known spammer. I've also added a few more domains to the auto-block list, as well as some more email keywords. Hopefully this will cut down on spam for a few weeks until the spambots start using new IP addresses, domain names, and email addresses.

In addition to the registration procedure, which requires image verification, and clicking on a link in a confirmation email, here's what we are doing to block spam on the forum (this is also posted in the FAQ section):

To cut down on spam, we have blocked access to the forum for users with email accounts from certain domain names. We're reasonably confident that no "real" people actually have tried to log on with any of these banned email addresses, just spam-bots. But if you have an email address from any of these providers, we recommend that you get a free email account from a service provider such as Google's GMail.
(List updated 01/10/07)

-cashette.com
-gawab.com
-christfirst.net
-topvideogalerz.info
-allwebdrugs.info
-web.de
-freepochta.info
-wwwfreemail.info
-freemail.info
-All domains ending with ".ru"

We have also banned all email addresses which contain any of the following words:

-pharm
-forex
-login
-viagra

Using this automated method of banning email addresses, we have cut down the amount of offensive spam and off-topic advertisements that are posted on the forum by about 80%. If you see any posts which look like spam, use the "report this post" feature to let a moderator know.

We also block IP addresses of known spammers. If you have a dynamic IP address, it is possible (although highly unlikely) that your IP address may be blocked due to someone else spamming the forum. If you believe this is the case, reset your IP address by restarting your computer / router / modem, and try again.

I think I've gotten all of the forums cleaned out completely, but should you find spam on the forum, please don't reply to the post (b/c it makes it blend in much better with legit posts if there's a response and I recognize the name of the last poster).

Most importantly...
If you find spam before I do, use the "report bad post" button (on the upper right, looks like a triangle with an exclamation point in it). This alerts me so I can delete the message and ban the spammer.

[dcwave]

Yeah its hard to keep up - everytime I log in I am deleting posts from the spammers that get through. Several other forums I visit have been having this problem too and it's been within the last few months.

===============================
While the military struggles in the desert to reign in multinational terrorists, a secret war is waged by ordinary folk; A war without any end in sight, fought across forums everywhere.

SPAM WARS.... (da da da daaaa daa da da da daaaa da...) :)

[Sonic]

It is hard to keep up on indeed and you guys are doing a sweet job. It's kinda nice having a few folks looking after the place.

[jmail]

It's most difficult to not respond to some of the *really* corny ones, but I shall restrain the child in me, and go the "report bad post" thingie route...

And really, the comedy show is over, as far as I'm concerned, with the spam. Our family gets hammered with spam, upwards of 400 spam mails a day coming thru on 4 accounts. Filtering helps for sure, but the spammers are constantly trying new ruses...

[itsplayed]

Later......

All domains ending with ".ru"


I guess the russians are on their own then!..............:p

I'm with you....will report!

[87PRS]

I've seen some discusting stuff on here since I've been a member, its good to know we have competant staff taking care of this issue...good job. I will hit the triangle from now on to help out.

All I ever get is sex spam, girls wanting to have sex, pimps wanting to sell it and drugs of every kind imaginable...oh yeah and new car sales...all go to bulk mail.

Thanks for cleaing the forum up!

[Audiodude]

Disgusting stuff aside, some of the spam is kind of humorous. I've been toying with the idea of moving some of the spam to a dedicated forum so we could preserve it and collectively poke fun at it, instead of just sending it to the trash. (Anything offensive will still get canned, obviously. I'm just talking about the subcriptions to O Magazine, iPods for $10, etc.)

Spam as a form of entertainment. What are your thoughts?

[nagal]

I like the idea of having a Spam forum!

[itsplayed]

Spam as a form of entertainment. What are your thoughts?

I like the idea, there were some one liners that I was just dying to get out, but I refrained myself from doing so. However, do you think that a dedicated forum to this will encourage more of the same and increase spam attacks? I guess a trial run wouldn't hurt.

[sabianq]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6593906684323060189&q=spam&hl=en

[sabianq]

this is really funny too

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1279288962194074236&q=spam&hl=en

[Audiodude]

Ladies and gentlemen... I give you...

the Spam Forum (http://www.audioforums.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=43).

[eedre]

That's actually a very old policy. Spam once, and you (and your IP address, and your email address) will be banned for life.

Most regular net users have dynamic IPs. So someone trying to register that has been assigned the banned IP from their ISP for a certain period of time could not. Good I guess for dedicated spammers.

[Audiodude]

With so many IP addresses out there, I figure the chance of a real user and a spambot getting the same one are slim, and I've seen spammers use the same IP over and over again with many different names, spanning over several weeks, so sometimes we can prevent a dozen or more registrations by banning a single IP.

At least until they reset the IP addresses and start all over again...

[eedre]

....At least until they reset the IP addresses and start all over again...


:rolleyes: Haha, true!

[ModAud]

An idea. There should be a mod out for vB that prevents users from posting links for their first x number of posts. http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=96018 as an example. Worth a try at least.

[vulcan_dc]

Jeff.... this mod would do great here mate....

Thanks ModAud..

cheers

[Audiodude]

I agree. I don't think it's something that would be easy to implement, however. It would require somebody higher up the IT food chain than myself to dedicate the manhours to implement and test any mods we do to the underlying code that runs this site.

But... As we've seen with the recent changes like the redesign and addition of monthly prizes, the more active AudioForums is, the more programming resources I'll be able to pull in to work on things like that.

So tell all of your friends to log on and post often, and maybe we can get things like that put into place.

For what it's worth, there's another mod out there that I thought was pretty cool. It's a spambot-proof authenticator that prevents bots from even registering in the first place:

www.kittenauth.com

I'd like to modify it so it comes up with a panel of 16 random images of audio gear and asks you to click on all of the microphones to continue. A real person would have no problem picking out a picture of a microphone from a keyboard, guitar, or something else. But a spambot would have a harder time.

[passerby3141]

I have to say, I'm a bit surprised. I haven't seen much spam here at all, any really. You guys must be doing a great job, or I don't come around as much as it feels like I do!

[tech1]

I still delete at least one very graphic spam post daily. The more benign stuff we all like to laugh at comes around much less frequently now. It all ends up in the Spam forum.

Online degrees, anyone...?

[BIG SHANE]

Post deleted by admin


This is this guys first post lol how does he know what audioforums used to be... spam has gotten bad but i can deal with it the help you get on audioforums imo is better than just about any where on the net i know audiodude does his best to keep spam off the site so im iight with it

PEACE

-BIG SHANE