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Well, I purged literally several *hundred* users, banned tons of email and IP addresses – mostly from Russia (?!). I *think* I got them all.
In the last week or so I’ve had over 100 people sign up. Now I have to approve them before they can post. All but a handful of those were spammers too, so I’ve deleted/banned them too.
So hopefully we’ll be spam-free from now on. If one of them does manage to sneak through, please do continue to alert me.
*Whew* glad to have that task done!
Jenn
time. Thanks again for all you do for this board! It seems that spam comes from everywhere and it’s really hard to avoid it!
Is that out of the hundreds that "registered" only a few ever posted. I think a lot of it is done by "spambots" – automated programs that register on forums.
I found a neat site called stopforumspam.com and I can put in any user ID and/or email address and/or IP address and if they’ve been reported as spammers to that site, they have a record of it. I compared almost every registered user from here, to their database, and I banned/deleted every one that had a record.
There’s a way to submit info to the site too but I didn’t quite get that figured out yet… but if all I had was the email address, that would give me the IP address (internet address) and country of origin. If I was in doubt, I deleted.
Took me about a week here and there, doing a few when I could. At least now I can monitor who registers, and so they can’t just sneak on. Sometimes I get 10-20 new registrations overnight. Easier to check them as I go than to have to go back and review every single one and go through the motions to delete them.
Lessons learned!
Jenn
different times? Or once registered, there looking for people’s e-mail addys to send junk that way? Sounds like a lesson learned the hard way.
exactly how much time and effort went into keeping spammers off. I hope you know just how much your work is appreciated. I love this board. Thank you.
Goody
There are forums on the forum spam website, but they all speak in technobabble and I’m not that savvy.
Based on the spam I’ve seen, it’s mostly fake ads for "male enhancement" drugs but usually clicking on a link will unleash some malware onto your computer.
Based on the email addresses – some were rather umm, interesting. Implied "trolling" for sex, etc., "mail order brides"… all kinds of bizarre stuff.
My business website had fewer registrations, but more actual spam posts -needless to say I cleaned that up too but there were only a dozen or so registrants, and one or two posted multiple messages as "comments" to my shop’s blog and newsletters. Links to whatever – I deleted them.
The worst part of the problem is that tons of spammers use Gmail. So do I, and so do a lot of people. So I can’t just ban everybody @gmail or that would ban a lot of legitimate users. So I have to look at each one. There were some domains I banned completely… anyone @(domain).ru (Russia), and anyone at some of the weird domains. Some I think are fake but the users registering can’t complete their activation because this system is set to send a verification email that they have to click a link within, to complete their membership activation. If somebody registers with a fake email address, they don’t receive the verification email – so that’s one way to slow them down a bit.
We’ll see how it goes from here. In hindsight I wish I’d set it up that way (manual verification) in the first place, but I was trying to make less work for myself. Ironically in the end it’s less work to look at each one individually and hit the "allow" or "delete" key
Still much easier than the old board. Since I’d closed registrations on the old main board for a long time, this was never an issue in the past.
Jenn
I know I’ve reported a couple to ya and you’ve taken care of them immediately! Amazing considering the sheer volume of spammers that you have to go through, that you can "get ’em" at all but we love your – "our" web site and do appreciate all the time and trouble that you have to take. Thank you!
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