Another spam topic: watching new members

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tepples
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Post by tepples »

Bregalad wrote:
The vast majority of spam messages that I've deleted from this board appear to have been generated by a bot. So it's either A. posted by a bot, or B. generated by a bot and copy-pasted into the forum by a human.
It would be the other way arround I guess ? Created by humans, posted by a bot. How could a computer create a message by it's own, and then an human stupidly copy/paste the message ?
First, a human constructs a template and a list of interchangeable parts (for example "bump this thread!" vs. "kick then ban █BOT TEST SPAM█ as soon as possible", or random selections from Project Gutenberg etexts). Later, the computer fills the template with pseudorandomly chosen parts, and either the computer posts it or a human copy-pastes it.

I found another canary in the list of new members that haven't posted yet: Google the user name and the part of the e-mail address before the @. If either shows up as a banned spammer on a couple other forums, scrub the account.

I also increased the delay after post from 5 seconds to 30.
tepples
Posts: 22708
Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2004 11:12 pm
Location: NE Indiana, USA (NTSC)
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Post by tepples »

Thanks for the suggestion on how to purge spammers' sleeper accounts. It appears the spam rate has declined sharply (to 0 it appears) now that I'm doing this.
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loopy
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Post by loopy »

Out of curiosity, did the rate of new spammers drop any after Memblers modified the registration page?
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