Forum Anti-Spam Suggestions

[ThistleWeb]

Limiting editing to a time period would stop people putting [SOLVED] in their post titles, unless you changed the forum to add an option to do this automatically.

Garvan

That's a good point, perhaps a separate drop down menu that does it, that's exempt from the editing window rules.

[dagon]

...I've noticed a few tactics spammers use and have a couple of suggestions on how to deal with them a little more effectively.

Post random *** then return to edit in spam links

This enables the post to die away from the "new posts" section where it will likely be spotted, reported and deleted along with the account. They can make the edit days later and not be noticed. If that post is on an old thread like "Mint 7 XFCE Released" it will likely go unnoticed for a long time.

A recent spammer hit us with...

My daughter has recently purchased a new laptop. She has an older desktop (gateway)with windows XP, that she wants to give to her daughter & son.
At this point she wants to see that the teens stay in sights that are child safe. With no ability to download illegal content such as ****, music or movies. Is there a way to do this in windows xp? Many friends online recommended that I should buy Internet filter for mac and family keylogger mac. But it seems only apply to mac computers, i don't know if it can also use on windows......Please do tell me if you have a solution to this…

Thanks so much for your time

What is the **** for?

[dagon]

As an example "I googled part of the message above:
"My daughter has recently purchased a new laptop. She has an older desktop (gateway)with windows XP, that she wants to give to her daughter & son."

How not to deal with spam:
http://forums.v3.co.uk/showthread.php?t=219841

Spamlink edited in:
http://forum.networktechs.com/showthread.php?s=7a90a10f52ef0e911b0ca632bfaef97a&t=10262
http://forum.networktechs.com/showthread.php?t=10262#post49037

and how to(same original message):
http://www.tech-pc.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=71119

[Oscar799]

Looks like the bad words filter caught the reference to adult entertainment....

[AlbertP]

Yeah, such a simple filter can't distinguish between good and bad uses of such words. But usually bad word filters display an error message instead of replacing a word by ****. Isn't the Mint bad words filter just the built-in filter of phpBB forums?

[Oscar799]

Yeah, such a simple filter can't distinguish between good and bad uses of such words. But usually bad word filters display an error message instead of replacing a word by ****. Isn't the Mint bad words filter just the built-in filter of phpBB forums?

It is a simple filter that can't distinguish context - it replaces with symbols or another word if one is specified as a replacement,it doesn't display any error message,in fact it lets you think it accepted what you typed but adds the substitute while processing the message.I know this as I tried it out - in the interest of finding out how it worked of course......

[dagon]

Looks like the bad words filter caught the reference to adult entertainment....

Ok. The message was removed but the account, I think, is still there? Why?

[ThistleWeb]

In my OP I actually typed four * as I knew the effect it'd have and the filter would kick in, so if that filter was removed on my post it wouldn't change anything. I dare say I'm rare on that use case though lol

[dagon]

Ah! I searched "****" as I didn't get it at all and had wikipedia once more enrichen my day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-letter_word

[AlbertP]

If you configure phpBB so that the first X posts have to be approved by a mod, editing a post (when the user has less than X posts) also has to be approved. This is IMO a good way to make spamming harder. And as phpBB is open-source, you can always modify the source to code your own restrictions.
You could perhaps code it so that links containing certain words are automatically converted to links to a Mint webpage. By looking through spam messages, you can collect lots of words for this. (And you can, if you have time to code it, do this only for people with less than X posts)

[xenopeek]

+1 to AlbertP's suggestions (don't say this out loud). I was actually about to post similar suggestion, having the first few posts of new users be moderated.

Suspect should anybody with just a few posts and with links in their signature, as the new tactic seems to be to post a random "welcome" or "thank you" message to a forum and then have a couple of links to spam in the signature.

[dagon]

Maybe it's time to prune out old accounts...
Like this: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=143&t=23796&start=0&hilit=pruning
There are users who hasn't been logged in since they registered like:

buyphentermineBGJ
GarenaSix

What's the point of these accounts anyway? Does the search engines look among the profiles too?

[AlbertP]

Search engines click links everywhere, so also in the memberlist. But you can restrict the access search engines have in phpBB. As I am not a search engine I can't try out what permissions are set, and I also have no access to the administrator panel so can't lookup how the permissions are set there. I think access to profiles is turned off by default.

[dagon]

Search engines click links everywhere, so also in the memberlist. But you can restrict the access search engines have in phpBB. As I am not a search engine I can't try out what permissions are set, and I also have no access to the administrator panel so can't lookup how the permissions are set there.

robots.txt
http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html#examples
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=42258&s=c27ab1d1edcfae4c208c1a7646b2ba30

Not that spambots care for that though...

I think access to profiles is turned off by default.

I think so too. At least it should be. I've seen other places with lots of spam where they only get some 30 new users registered every day but none of them post anything. Ever.
They're only there for the links. Less agressive but spam nonetheless. And oh... their birthday is allways on the day they registered, off course!

[AlbertP]

Anyway, it's perhaps time for a next prune. This will also decrease the database size making the load lighter for the server (which has often refused connections because there was too much forum activity at once).

[dagon]

How about playing the spambots a little trick?
A "present yourself" thread that looks something like this would be pretty much impossible for a bot to handle... or resist!

Hi!

I'm new here (not)... what do you think of my desktop?