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Hey Guys,
Panda has launched their global forum for which they asked myself to Mod.
http://support.pandasecurity.com/forum
Going good however I am having an issue with spammers and people posting their personal homepages / blogs whatever on every subsection on the forum.
What sort of security can i suggest to stop this sort of thing? Dont know too much how forum security and registering works?
JP: could you give some advice here?
Thanks
I can give you tons of advice, but unfortunately you're not running vBulletin. Your options are considerably more limited with PHP BB. The first thing I can tell you is, virtually all forum spam comes from Asia and former Soviet republics. You'll get a sprinkling of IPs from zombie computers elsewhere, but you'll find the network that runs them is Russian.
I know that there is a spam filter available for that software. I think that would be a good place to start. You probably can't make use of IP blocking because panda won't want to just block all of Asia and much of Eastern Europe.
I agree with JP re: IP blocking. We grep logs and update our perimeter router ACLs on a weekly basis. While it's not perfect, it very effective and efficient. The only hassle for us is when we sometimes deal with a vendor or client from overseas, we need to poke a hole for their email traffic. A minor nuisance compared with the benefits of blocking the spam at the perimeter.
CSR
I forgot to mention Nigeria. All cellphone/handheld spam comes from there.
Greetz.
Maybe take a look over at stopforumspam.com they have a phpBB2 API, from memory it isn't hard to update to phpBB3.
Also take a look at http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/PWNtcha it explains various weakness in the different captcha's. You should be able to use that as a reference and design a difficult captcha for the bots..:halo:
Bots stroll right by most every CAPTCHA now. Use instructions that are easy for humans, but impossible for bots, such as: "At the top left of the page there is a header graphic of the site's name. Below it is some text. What does the text say?". etc.
Bots can't deal with directions such as that.
Hi,
At the end of the day humans have to moderate your forum, as you will find that you are actually being attacked by humans.
You have a member zl399hihi934 (not particularly believable as a nick?). They have been around for 11 days and have spammed you 13 times.............in Chinese :D
Neither my browser nor myself do Chinese, but it is obviously the same message with similar links in each post..............that has to be spam because the topics of the threads are quite different.
You are going to get spammed.............it is inevitable, so part of the secret is deleting the crap and banning the account ASAP.
Spammers tend to give up on actively moderated sites, although there are always new ones to take their places :mad:
well, yes and no. If you have the luxury of using IP banning at your own discretion, and you're willing to block all of Asia as well as Russia and the former Soviet republics, plus Nigeria, you can pretty much stop worrying about forum spam. There will only be occasional instances, but you will have eliminated 95% by blocking those regions. All the other regions of the world combined make up the other 5%.
Hey Guys,
I dont have time right now to go through everyting but are you guys telling me this is zombie spamming bots and not actual people.
Usually, yes. Put up a post limit for new accounts. Say only 1 post per 5 min. for the first 10. No links allowed until then either. That'll slow them down a bit.
Visit regularly, look at the new registrations, weed out the crap. Remove spam posts a.s.a.p. and ban the user's account.
Hey there,Quote:
Originally Posted by SirDice
I try and do jsut that. I ip ban it rather tan username ban it.
Thanks for the advice.
I promise ill go through all the posts today still.
LOL - Nihil has started to take over!
Should I ban him :)
:lildevil:Quote:
Originally Posted by Cider
you might find this helpful. Like I said I have a lot more experience with vBulletin, but we still do run a couple of PHP BB forums. I can't stand them myself, extremely primitive software by comparison, but it is what it is.
Thanks,
Will have a look ...
I wonder how getting rid of the word register and renameing the scripts would par against them.
crossing up the spambots is actually the relatively easy part. But there's still a fair number of human spammers in China and India especially.
Hi Cider.
I've not been around for a while, but we are about to launch a forum for work. We are banning all urls for the time being, and will probably only allow urls in future once the article has been moderated.
You might like to limit your workload by only allowing urls to be posted after moderation, but other posts to be let through.
That way the first spam you get from a (spam) user and you can ban the user and delete evrything they have written in one go.
Regards,
Steve