On Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:23:28 -0600 "F C. Costero" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thanks for the input Rob. I will pass it on to the forum. Some of the > volunteers commented over the weekend that it was more like a denial > of service attack. At one point the forum did become unavailable but > Hagar contacted Infra and it was back on line promptly. A few spam > messages are still coming in, at a rate I would have called high > before last week, but things remain vastly better than the weekend. > Francis > > > > > > What you are seeing is odd. A successful spammer does not work this > > way. They want their posts to survive and persist, to have impact. To > > build up Google Pagerank they want posts on 400 different websites > > rather than 400 posts on one website. It doesn't make sense to send > > 400 to one website, since that will obviously draw attention from > > moderators. This sounds more like a denial of service attack than > > spam. > > > > But a few ideas that might work, based on my experience running forums: > > > > 1) Change the CAPTCHA used in your registration. What you have right > > now is too easy. > > > > 2) Much forum spam is targeted at getting links to raise their search > > engine position. You can remove that incentive by ensuring that all > > links given by users are given the rel="nofollow" attribute. Most > > major sites, like Wikipedia, online newspapers, etc., do this in order > > to reduce the incentive to add spam. I have the impression that the > > spammers search the web for high Pagerank websites that do not cloak > > their URL's with nofollow. These sites are targeted by spammers. If > > we get off that list, then we'll get less spam. > > > > 3) Longer term, maybe there is some way we can run forum posts through > > Apache's SpamAssasin? It would probably require some custom app dev > > with phpBB, but it could result in a very sophisticated anti-spam > > solution. > > > > -Rob > > > > > >> Francis > The situation is improved on what it was, but still unacceptable. I have Moderator privileges on the Forum and in 3.5 hours I have banned at least 15 spammers and directly deleted their postings/topics rather than move them to holding locations, as I see no need to clutter these up with undoubted spam; there have been sometimes as many as five or six postings by a spammer. Acknak and Hagar have also been active during that period and I do not include their totals; the moderator logs which are accessible to Apache Observers will show the extent of the problem, which a visit to the main pages of the Forum will not, as we are trying to keep the Forum running as normally as possible. -- Rory O'Farrell <[email protected]>
