Spammers...

[Peter van Es]

A great catch yesterday…. 33 spammers tried to join our site in a single day! A record ! Two clicks and they are gone forever…

[mbzse]

A great catch yesterday…. 33 spammers.../... gone forever…

You are a vigilant gatekeeper, Peter     Thanks!
/Hans in Sweden

[kampala]

Peter,

We seriously appreciate the clean forum!  Don't know how you guys keep it that way.  Well done.

Thanks.

[Peter van Es]

I've no clue what is going on. Today the catch was even bigger… many using a russian mail domain…



They must have written a script that foils my registration question. I'll just change that question again, and they can throw the script away and start over again….

Peter

[JamesL]

There was a thing I read recently about spamming filters and that the questions are increasingly being answered by robots
But a simple check box fools them as while they can program a machine to check a box, it's always checked too perfectly - ie cannot reproduce the unsteady hand/eye of a human. So the filter monitors not the click in the check-box but the mouse movement to get it there.

I'm sort of surprised that the software providers for the board haven't got things in place

[mdsalemi]

Peter,

Sounds like a lot of work...
Are there more things you can do to even prevent this stuff from coming to you?
You are far more in tune to this than I, but what about the Capcha/ReCapcha questions; two or three step verifications; two or three step questions, human verification
I assume you are banning the IP addresses. Heck, I'd just block anything with a Russian or Chinese mail domain and or add other countries where this stuff seems to come from.

I fear one day you'll tire of this...

[Peter van Es]

We already do all of this:

• we have Google's ReCaptcha, which (on our site) does the character recognition, but will incorporate the click function that James refers to automatically
• we have two additional verification questions (which I just changed) and some other registration tricks
• and… the registrations should get through stop-forum-spam, which then requires human interaction

So we are pretty solid: none of these spammers signed up successfully. Deleting them is easy (two clicks). But with my changes in the questions, I'm sure the volume will be right down again.

Peter

[mdsalemi]

Excellent. Since I have not had to go through this process, I have no idea what's there! 
Personally I like that verification used by PayPal and some others of note, that use a text message and or email reply but sounds like that might be overkill and if you can delete with two clicks, great!

[pj]

Just FYI, my astronomy club's forum got hit in a similar way yesterday. And I only belong to 2 forums, so that's 100%. Something is going on somewhere? Nice to know our admins can deal with this so quickly.

[Flyair]

looks like Russia prevails as origin of spams... a way of vengeance against sanctions?

[Peter van Es]

My tiny little changes foiled all new spam-bots. I can tell from the logs that there were hundreds of registration attempts again in the last 24 hours. No one got through.

The question was changed to: What girl's name is part of the brand name of the car?

Easy for enthusiasts... For the next 2 years impossible for robots!

(Ps: do not give them the answer...)

[mdsalemi]

Ok Peter...I see it has officially moved from a "chore" to a fun challenge!  Keep up the good work, and report back on those bad guys now and then.

Hey, some guy in Nigeria just sent me an email wanting to send me $25,000,000. What do you think? 

[Rolf-Dieter ✝︎]

Mike, I get a lot of calls having been selected to win this or that or that I've won this or that etc. I tell them if I win give it to charety then hang up on them.

Sometimes I like to do this to them like this fellow did ===> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmKtS-k12b0

Peter, you fine tuned the site to keep the site clean ... nice job!

[Larry & Norma]

 

[JamesL]

Has to be done...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

[JamesL]

I've also just come across an anti-spam thing that requires the registrant to "assemble" a picture - kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. Complete the picture type thing