spambots again

[GuenterMueller]

The LabVIEW forum is again spammed. The activity is admirable ...

[udka]

Seiously 😛 3-4 pages of only spam... 🙂 Getting irritated!!!

[GuenterMueller]

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@udka wrote:
Seiously 😛 3-4 pages of only spam... 🙂 Getting irritated!!!

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3 to 4 pages?  Do my eyes need a check?  I noticed the current 8 pages were almost fully spammed and decided to give up checking page 9 ...

[udka]

Yes you are right...when i posted i was still clicking next and then next and so on.... 😛

[rolfk]

even more now! How desperate has anyone to be to actually call any number in such posts? And if nobody would do that, those spams would eventually stop.

[RavensFan]

What is ridiculous is that all of these posts in the latest spells over the last couple months have all had some commone words in their message titles.  Words that are not true English words (or E-S-C-O-R-T) that have a weird combination of real characters and odd script characters.  Words that would never show up in a legitimate message.  Any message that uses the crazy script characters should be automatically blocked.

Why haven't these words been added to the list of banned words that prevent messages from being posted?

At least it will cut down on the messages for a short while until the spammers create a different message using some other combination of words.

EDIT:  While posting this message, I tried to include one of the words in the message body  (luck  now).  And the message was blocked.  Since the originaly messages had this word in the message body, maybe it was just starting to be blocked today.  So that leads to the question, why is the message not blocked when that word is included in the message header?  (See this message's subject which I edited to include that word?)

[altenbach]

The purpose of these spams escapes me, but they are all over the internet in many, many forums.

Nobody in his right mind would manually posts all these, because the return/post is likely less than the time+effort involved, even in very low wage countries.

Obviously, somebody is selling kits that automate all that. Good bot protection is one of the key necessities of any forum provide, and it seems that Lithium is severly lacking in these tools. I truly hope that they are analyzing the pathways used and put a few of their star programmers on this problem. Get on it!

Lithium is in the unique position to be able to pool spammer information across all their customers. All they need is a dynamic block list that is immediately and automatically propagated across all lithium forums: there are many big ones (ebay, verizon, lenovo, toshiba, HP, etc.). They also needs a streamlined spam tagging mechanism as already described. How about a blue button next to the [spell check] that says [flag as spam]? How about a blue button on the user page that says [flag as spammer]? The rest could be fully automated behind the scenes with a threshold based on the number of reports and the reputation of the reporters.

Gmail can do it. If any user can recognize these spams by looking at it for 20ms, code should be able to do the same in a few nanoseconds.

Lithium needs to provide tools to limit new users by post count and posting rate. Nobody needs to start 234 new threads in 4 hours.

[GuenterMueller]

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altenbach wrote:

[...]

Lithium needs to provide tools to limit new users by post count and posting rate. Nobody needs to start 234 new threads in 4 hours.

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Just to be fair (and degrade the skills of the spammer): It took him about 5 hours for posting 234 threads 

[JÞB]

Just a thought,

Perhaps user Aliases should REQUIRE an exact "Space" character.  (That ought to blow up that java weenie's Spambot)

[altenbach]

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Jeff·Þ·Bohrer wrote:

Perhaps user Aliases should REQUIRE an exact "Space" character.  (That ought to blow up that java weenie's Spambot)

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Is there an exploit based on this?