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Board Spammers


Denny

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Found this posted by one of the administrators on one of the other non-Christmas boards that I visit. Maybe a heads-up for the LOR administrators:



Just as a heads-up to board members, there's been a major attack of spammers going on right now on a variety of bulletin board and email sites (Vbulletin, phpBB, IPS, Gmail) around the world. We're being affected by that right now as well.

The reason for that is that spammers have developed new software that allows them to get past the CAPTCHA (the scrambled letter image security feature that everybody goes through when registering), which means that they can use computer bots to automate their spam posting.

I'm going to take the board down soon to make some updates (will let you know the downtime shortly). But even after that, there may still be some that gets through as we tweak the system.

There's no security threat to board members. These are just spammers who want to push their junk on our boards. We apologize in advance for anything that may get through.

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Good point Denny. Someone I know is also having serious problems with webbots registering on his site that uses images.

I had a problem with that stuff a few years ago on my board, and I went away from using the CAPTCHA. IMHO, I think those things never work well and they are totally annoying. The only people that CAN'T read those characters are the REAL users who want to create an account or get in. I think they are worthless tools.

My board selects one of many simple questions that a use has to answer, and that everyone knows. i.e. Questions like "Are you human?" , or "What color is a tree", and then the user selects answers from one or more option boxes. I haven't had a single attack in 3 years, and no one complains about registering. It beats the heck out of using those stupid images.

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This forum has been under attack since day one. A few spammers do get through but most do not. We manually review each new user. It is getting out of hand. We have about 2500 members which means we had somewhere around 25,000 spammers that we had to filter out. It is a real waste of time.

Some are easy to spot with product names as user name... Others are not so easy to spot.

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LightORamaDan wrote:

This forum has been under attack since day one. A few spammers do get through but most do not. We manually review each new user. It is getting out of hand. We have about 2500 members which means we had somewhere around 25,000 spammers that we had to filter out. It is a real waste of time.

Some are easy to spot with product names as user name... Others are not so easy to spot.

How about enlisting some help from our members. Perhaps place a posting on the main board that if members see spammers on the board, report them via an email address or PM. As you know, most are easy to spot. They want to advertise some ridiculous product.
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Richard Hamilton wrote:

LightORamaDan wrote:
This forum has been under attack since day one. A few spammers do get through but most do not. We manually review each new user. It is getting out of hand. We have about 2500 members which means we had somewhere around 25,000 spammers that we had to filter out. It is a real waste of time.

How about enlisting some help from our members. Perhaps place a posting on the main board that if members see spammers on the board, report them via an email address or PM. As you know, most are easy to spot. They want to advertise some ridiculous product.

I agree. I wouldn't mind contributing some help to the board.
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WOWBB doesn't allow for a lot of sub delegation or reporting. There are other options even Free BB software that does allow this. Maybe time to look into one of these. I also would be willing to help out.

Harrison

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I really like using vBulletin-- PC has drastically improved since switching to that. And they were able to transistion from WowBB without losing messages, so hopefully LOR could too...

-Tim

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Guest wbottomley

LightORamaDan wrote:

Perhaps next year we will switch to a new system.


Dan... May I suggest VBulletin too.

I've had no problems installing, running, and running a few plugins too.

VBulletin has a tool that allows you to import all posts from WOWBB.
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I just set up a forum for my office about a month ago and am using Simple Machines. Free software and has lots of abilities. The admin and moderator tools are pretty extensive. Oh and did I mention FREE.

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Mountainwxman wrote:

LightORamaDan wrote:
Perhaps next year we will switch to a new system.


Dan... May I suggest VBulletin too.

I've had no problems installing, running, and running a few plugins too.

VBulletin has a tool that allows you to import all posts from WOWBB.

This would be mine also.

Harrison
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JR V wrote:

I just set up a forum for my office about a month ago and am using Simple Machines. Free software and has lots of abilities. The admin and moderator tools are pretty extensive. Oh and did I mention FREE.

I also use SMF for my board. I had vBulletin and it was also good, but I switched to SMF for other maintenanceand updating reasons. Both SMF and VBulletin work well in my opinion. (better thanb wowbb.)
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