What's up with all of the SPAM recently???

[shutterdown]

Drat! I was ready to place my order!

[ham]

Another vb forum I moderate has a similar issue lately, so I suspect they've found a way around vb., but all spam posts are "pre-moderated" making it much easier to tidy up.

[Jayson]

I'm sorry, I didn't mean it to say I was digging on the Admins...I know they have other things to do and are very fast at deleting stuff. There have been one or two the last couple days which wasn't an issue, but yesterday I had three pages of SPAM post in my what's new section. I was wondering if the filters were broken on the site or what was going on.

[Jayson]

The first thing I did to try and lessen the SPAM activity was change the verification method to reCAPTCHA. Unfortunately reCAPTCHA has been cracked. And on that note, I've reverted back to a question/answer type of human verification system for new member registration.

There are indeed a couple of security holes in the version of vBulletin that we are currently using.

When I attempted to update the software a few days ago, things did not go as planned (to say the least). The update broke the navigation links throughout the community pages. We had to do a full restore. We still believe upgrading the software is a good start to eventually alleviating the problem--that's why we're going to try it again once we have feel we are more prepared for the problems that that may arise.

My hat goes off to the forum moderators--they've been doing a more than admirable job of keeping the forums clean against a constant flow of attacks.

-Sean

I agree that they do a great job and this is one of the best managed forums that I frequent. Keep up the good work!

[DavidEccleston]

There was at least one less set of eyes killing spam, as I was in Seattle for the week, but usually Sean and neuro delete as much spam as I do. I missed the great-spam-influx of last week, so I can't comment on it at all, whether it was tied to Sean's forum upgrade attempts, or the switch to captchas, or just a pre-holiday rush of spammers.

[ahab1372]

I think what was different in this one wave of spam was that a lot of spam was posted under just two users. Usually you see far less posts per spam user, maybe in an attempt to stay under the radar.
Keep in mind that spam is posted automatically, so a little tweak in the settings in the spammer's machinery results in many vs few spam posts

[DavidEccleston]

I've killed 2 or 3 sets of spam that were a lot of posts from one users (often times, several replies to the same thread, right after each other). I like this spam, as I can kill it all with a single click, instead of having to kill each new user and their messages one by one.

[neuroanatomist]

I've killed 2 or 3 sets of spam that were a lot of posts from one users (often times, several replies to the same thread, right after each other). I like this spam, as I can kill it all with a single click, instead of having to kill each new user and their messages one by one.

I like it, too...usually. But that unusually large set, the spambots hit >50 posts per user, which prevents ban + delete-all-posts.

[DavidEccleston]

Maybe we need an add-on, if a user posts >50 posts in under 2 hours, they're automatically banned.

[Sheiky]

Maybe we need an add-on, if a user posts >50 posts in under 2 hours, they're automatically banned.

That means I really have to try to find more regular time. Reading and posting once a week or two might get me into the danger zone