I've been seeing a lot of bot spammage going on these forums by way of new registered users. I've yet to see any start making posts, but might there be a way to combat them? We have over 146 pages of members. While I'd like to think they are all real people looking for smaugmuds... We all know the truth.

I'm just worried that smaugmuds will happen to get black listed like they did a while back.

ayuri

Could be the case, but haven't seen any ads have you?

Some are setting their website's to unknown links.
Given how some search engines rank your site by what links you have they could end up moving this site way to the bottom or giving up the famous 'this site may harm your computer'.

ayuri

So uhh digging a bit deeper about ads and what not:
Check this forum out. Has to be the longest on the server!
http://smaugmuds.org/index.php?a=topic&t=4645&min=4294967280&num=20

I give you 214748365 PAGES!



ayuri

Numerous attempts have been made to stop them, but sadly this software just isn't up to the task anymore. Neither Kayle nor myself has the time to look into trying to address it either, short of mass deletions of member IDs with no posts. That only lasts for so long too.

That gnarly topic with thousands of empty pages? Well, that was certainly different, but indicates that the spam prevention was working or there would have been thousands of actual posts to go with it. Needless to say I deleted the topic.

Eh.... and in looking at the admin panel, there's a whole lot of blocked registrations happening so what measures we do have are working, just not well enough.

at least they are working at all.

As far as the concern about search traffic picking up all the bogus URLs, that's not an issue. Guest accounts don't see anyone on the members list with 0 posts.

Spammers have to overcome the far more effective post spam detection to get to the point of their link spam mattering.

For the curious, QSFP has Akismet protection in it. Highly effective at blocking spam for blogs and forum posts, but nowhere near as effective at blocking bogus registrations or profile changes. It simply wasn't designed to handle that. Which means it's still doing a fabulous job considering it's blocked thousands of attempts to do that.

Thanks for the reply Samson.
Just when I came here and logged in to pester the people my work's webfilter went ballistic. I was just concerned that bad joo joo would be going down.

Thanks again,
ayuri

I highly suggest a custom field QA on registration; it stops 99% of bots for a period of time.

Something like:

"What color is a blue sky?"

"How many letters is in 'MUD'?"

[EDIT] Seems there is one? Change it up once in a while.

What's the airspeed velocity of an unladen sparrow?

Quixadhal said:

What's the airspeed velocity of an unladen sparrow?

What do you mean? An African or European swallow?

What? I don't know.....ahhhhhh

Smaugmuds getting blacklisted wasn't anything to do with spam on the site itself. It actually had to do with someone breaching my server via an underprotected user account that unfortunately had sudo access. Which allowed the individual to set up an email spam bot that was specifically targetting Comcast users, which is what caused Comcast Technical Services to put a service wide block on any traffic coming off my server.

All the same, it's become quite obvious this software can't cut it anymore. It might be time to begin looking at other options that are still being properly maintained.

There's been nearly 400 new registrations just in the last couple of days since I purged them all. There's no way to keep up with that on antiquated forum software.