Thank the spammers

Mary · SearchIRC Admin Joined: 03 May 2003 Posts: 692

We seem to be getting quite a few spammers who register just to post private messages to our users. Sooo... Jason put in code that we hope will help the problem.

If you get spam messages please copy them to me or help@searchirc.com cause we just Love spam.

Jason · Posted: Jan 18, 2008 10:32am Post subject:

I put in 2 new rules for successful PM. It shouldn't effect real people, at least not in theory.

PingBad · Guru Joined: 05 Feb 2005 Posts: 2010 Location: New Zealand

Gee, THANKS spammers! Mad

sirkit · Newbie Joined: 27 Nov 2007 Posts: 63 Location: eth0

thanks spammers o;
did you ban there accounts?

Mary · SearchIRC Admin Joined: 03 May 2003 Posts: 692

sirkit, of course.

Banning and deletions doesn't really work because they come in on new IPs and register new nicknames. That's why we need all sorts of anti spam code.

Anarchy · Posted: Jan 25, 2008 12:31pm Post subject:

Welcome kids to the world wide spam... they might as well change the www. to wws.url.com

Jason · Posted: Apr 15, 2008 9:02am Post subject:

I just did a mass purge of user accounts ... they weren't used (yet) for spamming, but they had stuff like "sex" as their website url, or viagra, etc. Basically spammy keywords and urls in the user accounts.

There is a possibility that some of the thousands purged were valid users, I tried to limit that as much as possible but I cannot wade through each account by hand. So if your account was axed on accident, please let me know (either here with a new account, or by the contact form http://searchirc.com/contact )

I also wiped clean stuff like user sigs (which we do not display anyway) for the spam accounts I missed, just so we don't have backlinks to spam domains.

Finally, I've enabled user validation, so when you signup now, you have to click the 'verify my email address / account' email that was sent to you. I usually dislike these things, but we're getting an insane amount of spammers here so we have to buckle up.

Snerf · Newbie Joined: 15 Sep 2004 Posts: 65 Location: IRC

Email verification does help a great deal with stopping spammers, does not stop them, but really slows it down.

PingBad · Guru Joined: 05 Feb 2005 Posts: 2010 Location: New Zealand

>3000 accounts axed by the looks of it. I may be wrong (this is the inner pessimist) but I've noticed a *lot* of accounts in the form of Propername_Randomlastname<3 random chars> showing in who's online and recently registered; while they don't set any profile info, I feel just a tad uneasy - expecting the worst, maybe...

Mary · SearchIRC Admin Joined: 03 May 2003 Posts: 692

Jobe · Posted: Apr 17, 2008 3:01pm Post subject:

And they're still at it too:

Florence_Youngercb6b7

Jason · Posted: Apr 19, 2008 2:45pm Post subject:

it's out of hand. I've disabled user registration. Tonight I'll put in some code that might help resolve this. We make it too easy for the spammers. So I'm going to rotate and rename the register links and if they've hard coded it or use google to look for links to register.php, we'll avoid them completely.

Jason · Posted: Apr 19, 2008 6:45pm Post subject:

OK, registration enabled. After monitoring the way the spam bots registered, I put in some cool code that should eliminate the spam registrations. They do some things humans cannot, so that makes it easy to stop.

Since these are premade spambots that are not custom designed for SearchIRC specifically, I believe this will be 100% effective. Hopefully I'm not proven wrong :)

Jason · Posted: Apr 21, 2008 7:32am Post subject:

It didn't work. They have slowed, but are not completely gone yet.

So I put up a few new requirements for registering... they're listed on the register page:

http://searchirc.com/boards/profile.php?mode=Pregister

Let's see if I'm more successful this time around. I don't think my methods are draconian enough to bother new users... let me know if there's any issue.

greg27 · Lurker Joined: 07 Oct 2006 Posts: 136 Location: Australia

you could give the honeypot form field a try - if the bots weren't coded specifically for sirc it should help.

create a new textbox on the register page and name it something like 'url'. use css to hide it from people (display:none). before creating an account for a new user, check to see if this textbox is empty - if it isn't, it is likely a bot.