Bill Stickers in cyberspace

Author
Discussion

turbobloke

Original Poster:

110,722 posts

273 months

Friday 9th March 2007
quotequote all
Something that littlegreenfairy might be itnerested in if the forum gets up and running...

I've meen managing another forum away from PH and unrelated to motoring matters, for a couple of years now. In the last month or two, there has been an increasinjg amount of traffic using the site to post adverts for the usual 'products' from viagra to porn.

It's been registered contributions only but 'they' register anyway. I've now taken an active interest in these visitors and have found that they tend to register and post in groups of two or three but from disparate parts of the world, IP address traces show they're typically located in Japan, Ukraine, Brazil, Bulgaria, USA and Australia. A few other places.

So, is there a world (or even a set of websites!) out there where forum URLs are posted for these parasites to go and stick their virtual bills? Can I modify the site to make it less visible or attractive - I don't need opr want surfer members as it's largely a site for specific professionals. Apart from getting the URLs and banning them, along with their IDs, is there anything proactive to do that would reduce the impact of these timewasters?

Any help gratefully received

timsta

2,779 posts

259 months

Friday 9th March 2007
quotequote all
Yep, there are a few things you can do....

First off, you need to stop them at the door. Make sure they're human, check they have a valid email addy then let them in.

Ok, so first off you need to check they're human. This is normally done with a captcha system. You know, the squiffy letter&numbers things. So look at getting that built into your registration system.

Don't let them post until their account has been activated by clicking a link in an email sent to them by the registration system. (This isn't foolproof, as the spammers have now written a system that checks it's own email and 'clicks' the link. Grr)

After that, there's not much else you can do. I don't have any issues with my forum unless I switch off the captcha verification image, then I get about 2 to 5 spammers a day.

Tim
www.hunnybeez.co.uk paperbag

P.S. Some forum systems are more prone than others. I had tons of issues with phpbb, even when using a captcha. I've no idea how they did it. But when I moved to smf the spammers just disappeared!

turbobloke

Original Poster:

110,722 posts

273 months

Friday 9th March 2007
quotequote all
timsta said:
Yep, there are a few things you can do....

Thanks
timsta said:

P.S. Some forum systems are more prone than others. I had tons of issues with phpbb
phpbb, funny you should mention that...

Scraggles

7,619 posts

237 months

Friday 9th March 2007
quotequote all
u can disable the links, eg

i can type www.google.co.uk for a search engine or use hyperlinks to make the text appaear to be something else

having to type out the full url of the dodgy pron or vi@gra site is less of an incentive

ip banning is another

turbobloke

Original Poster:

110,722 posts

273 months

Saturday 10th March 2007
quotequote all
Scraggles said:
ip banning
Yes I've been doing that,,,but if these parasites are humans rather than bots then I get the impression they're either hijacking a series of different machines or have a facility to somehow change their IP address, either way they seem to pop up again.

Scraggles

7,619 posts

237 months

Saturday 10th March 2007
quotequote all
a site i uses, lets people use hyperlinks to make a very long and dodgy looking url be a clickable link.

if you disabled it, then the urge to spam soon goes away, soemthing they have not realised yet,

yes it is a pain for legitimate users, but way ti goes

corozin

2,680 posts

284 months

Saturday 10th March 2007
quotequote all
You should also insist in your forum's T&C that memberships will not be accepted from Hotmail or Yahoo! email accounts. Doing that dramatically reduced the problems I had from these webcrawlers on a forum 3-4 years ago.

turbobloke

Original Poster:

110,722 posts

273 months

Saturday 10th March 2007
quotequote all
Many thanks folks.