Emergency measures

[Kotik]

I'm getting sick of this... I had to recall just about every east european language to tell spammers where to stick it today... We should close the board until we haver measures in place that avoid spam accounts as we seem to be under constant attack lately...

KILLL SPAMMERZ

[Kotik]

I've just taken down one malaysian IP, only for a new arrival to make itself seen via chinese channels by the name of malekoemer. We're fucked. Someone tries to **** us up the backside in the worst possible way. Heck knows why someone targets a niche-site like us.

[Distracted]

I've deleted the threads, but somebody needs to shut the back door. I just alerted Elessar.

[putaro]

Nuke them from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.

Spam is like a lot of crime - the benefit to the criminal is far less than the amount of expense and annoyance to the victim. I wonder what these spams were even trying to do. Some kind of SEO? I didn't see any links in them and the text was nonsensical.

[Kotik]

It wasn't exactly nonsensical. It were first a russian plugging of a gambling server, but the really nasty spamming came from some polish idiots, who - among other things - left some rather hatred filled diatribes against other east european people.

[justTripn]

Thanks Kotik. The IT guys have been alerted. Thanks for monitoring the situation and yelling at the bad guys. I don't see any bad guys on here today. *crosses fingers*

[Cogito]

I don't see any bad guys on here today.

You just had to say it, didn't you?

(scoosyDic)

[Kotik]

Yes scoosyDic seems to be another account meant for spamming. At least it is the only user around here with a porn website as his/her homepage, but it's either the worlds most useless spammer or he/she has realized that the stuff won't stay up very long. The things that really riddle me are:

a) why now?
b) why we?
c) why so many?

It seems sort of useless to pester a forum which sees about 10-20 posts a day.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

There are still a lot of new accounts made these past few days that probably ought to be deleted.

[Kotik]

Yeah, three alone have been created today, but since last night at least they have not posted anything. They either understood that we fight back or our mods have gotten extremely quick at deleting the threads.

[putaro]

Yeah, three alone have been created today, but since last night at least they have not posted anything.

You spoke too soon!

[Kotik]

Godammit, these guys are starting to go on my non-existant t*ts

[Cogito]

I know these spammers are idiots, but I suspect even they would realise the pointlessness of putting their spam links on a board with such a small readership.

Perhaps they have got an automated crawler that trawls the web looking for vulnerable php servers, and they don't bother about how big/small the sites are.

But I suspect that the aim is not to get us to respond to the spam, but to get web bots to notice all these links to their sites in the hope it will boost their page rankings.

In any case, having posts from new members go through moderation would eliminate all of this. Having membership applications go through a human approval process would also work.

[Alelou]

I've also seen at least one site that asks a basic question any Trekkie would know. Presumably that sorts the Trekkies from the bots.

[Kotik]

These are not bots. They are humans, because they react to being fought. Two days ago I could track one of the russians to a malaysian domain (They use proxies there, because east-asian countries don't track connection data, unlike most of the Stasi-governments in Europe). I doubt we're dealing with bots here. I suspect we are facing rather sad indivuals with too much free time at their hands.