Another Mess

[systemcat]

I know it seems I haven't been around for a while but I have. A lot of PMing and just looking at messages.

Some thing has come up and this is the place I think is best to post it.

'K a while back I was made a Mod. to a friend's forum. That forum crashed due to spammers the friend didn't have a moment to get rid of. Had nothing to do with the posts, I deleted them, it was just there were more of them than real members.

Now I transfered that forum, merged it into my own to save it. End of that part of the story.

About a month ago I got an invite into what mainly is noted as an artist's forum. That forum has not only a spammer membership issue but very noticeable software bugs. One of it's Mod.s / Admin.s quickly appointed me to the same level as himself because of the advice and help I was offering to combat the issues. Nothing is working and now the people that have been there longer than me want to jump ship.

What is it with this happening!?

I offered this second forum, "what if a new forum was made with this forum's contents transfered?" and I'm thinking of offering the merge idea again of that one to mine. ...I don't know what to do here.

 

[jassian]

Pfew. I think all you really can do is offer your advice.
I got the suspicion that in your kindness you tend to try to fix everyone's problem
(I have that too sometimes)

Maybe it's too late to save the place, but your solutions sound like very good ideas.
Now it still depends on people having the motivation and energy left to make use of it.
And if they don't it's definitely not your fault. You can't save them all.
(i feel like I'm talking to Sam here )

 

[feldon30]

Well first it comes down to the software. If they are using out-of-date forum software or worse some forum hosting system like proboards or ezboard, then that can really make for a lot of extra work.

I love vBulletin, but I realize it's $180 to buy and most forums cannot justify that. I am using phpBB on another forum and we've got it locked down pretty tight just by changing settings. If we have to, we'll install additional plugins to make registering more difficult.

 

[NYCSciFiFan]

We had a major porn spam attack a few months ago on three other boards. There was a group of players who quietly registered twenty or thirty new IDs. Then, on one day, they all signed on and started posting graphic pornography and links. One board actually crashed and didn't come back up for two weeks, but they're always up and down, so who knows what else happened.

There are three mods (incl. me) and an admin/owner on one of the boards, so we tackled the problem this way:

1) Deleted the spam and banned the users. This is a one-step job under the new vBulletin software. I also went through and cleansed their profiles, removing signatures, emails, PM's, etc. just to prevent any search crawlers from finding any trace of them.
2) Ran a query against the most recent new users. Anyone with the same IP as the spammers got banned before they could sign on again.
3) Temporarily changed the security settings for new users so their posts required moderation. That way, we could see the spam before the board users did, and deal with it appropriately. Saved the board's reputation with its users. (IIRC, that's one of the features of this board, correct?)
4) Changed the registration process to require email verification as well as answering a trivia question about the board topic, lol.

That last one was a stroke of genius on the board owner's part. Some of the questions he included were hilarious and easy to answer if you know anything about the board's major topic, but a spammer wouldn't want to be bothered looking up the answers.

We only get a spammer once a month now. For some reason, it usually happens when I'm online, so it's gone before the users hit "report." As Mad-Eye Moody always said, "Eternal Vigilence!"

 

[ohboy]

That last one was a stroke of genius on the board owner's part. Some of the questions he included were hilarious and easy to answer if you know anything about the board's major topic, but a spammer wouldn't want to be bothered looking up the answers.

That's a good idea, to make people answer a question about the board. :lol

As for the problem, though. This is going to sound rough, but perhaps you should ask go through the members list, and purge anyone that would have slightest inkling of being a spammer. Or have the administrator give a list out to you of all the people that have been on and he knows is not a spammer, and oust the rest. A few innocent people might get booted, but after you get rid of all of them, you could install the safeguards like NYC suggested.

I sound like some brutal dictator now, don't I?

 

[feldon30]

My forums are set so that until a user has their first post approved, none of their posts are visible to the public. So they can go nuts posting whatever garbage they want and nobody will ever see it except administrators.

Not sure why what people rae posting would "crash the board for 2 weeks" unless it was a very marginal server, or the software was out-of-date and a security exploit was used.

That's a fantastic idea about having some kind of easy trivia question before you can sign up. Like "what was the last episode of Quantum Leap titled?" or "What was the name of the computer program that runs Project Quantum Leap?". Easy stuff for almost anyone except spammers.

 

[systemcat]

We had a major porn spam attack a few months ago on three other boards. There was a group of players who quietly registered twenty or thirty new IDs. Then, on one day, they all signed on and started posting graphic pornography and links. One board actually crashed and didn't come back up for two weeks, but they're always up and down, so who knows what else happened.

There are three mods (incl. me) and an admin/owner on one of the boards, so we tackled the problem this way:

1) Deleted the spam and banned the users. This is a one-step job under the new vBulletin software. I also went through and cleansed their profiles, removing signatures, emails, PM's, etc. just to prevent any search crawlers from finding any trace of them.
2) Ran a query against the most recent new users. Anyone with the same IP as the spammers got banned before they could sign on again.
3) Temporarily changed the security settings for new users so their posts required moderation. That way, we could see the spam before the board users did, and deal with it appropriately. Saved the board's reputation with its users. (IIRC, that's one of the features of this board, correct?)
4) Changed the registration process to require email verification as well as answering a trivia question about the board topic, lol.

That last one was a stroke of genius on the board owner's part. Some of the questions he included were hilarious and easy to answer if you know anything about the board's major topic, but a spammer wouldn't want to be bothered looking up the answers.

We only get a spammer once a month now. For some reason, it usually happens when I'm online, so it's gone before the users hit "report." As Mad-Eye Moody always said, "Eternal Vigilence!"

Every thing you've mentioned has been done it's just the software bugs keep letting stuff happen.

The forum is running under phpBB 2.0.22 through BToNuke.

My forums are set so that until a user has their first post approved, none of their posts are visible to the public. So they can go nuts posting whatever garbage they want and nobody will ever see it except administrators.

Not sure why what people rae posting would "crash the board for 2 weeks" unless it was a very marginal server, or the software was out-of-date and a security exploit was used.

That's a fantastic idea about having some kind of easy trivia question before you can sign up. Like "what was the last episode of Quantum Leap titled?" or "What was the name of the computer program that runs Project Quantum Leap?". Easy stuff for almost anyone except spammers.

One member did bring up that suggestion and had a good idea for it but no one knows how to code it in.

 

[feldon30]

Every thing you've mentioned has been done it's just the software bugs keep letting stuff happen.

The forum is running under phpBB 2.0.22 through BToNuke.

phpBB 2.0.x is obsolete and I don't know about BToNuke but some of those Nuke type scripts can have a lot of vulnerabilities.