I really wonder how these spamming bots work, do they crawl the web themselves to find any forums they can to spam, or does someone manually select vexforum.com (among many others I would suppose) to be spammed? Because any slightly intelligent person who sees this site would probably notice immediately that posts in Korean are pretty pointless, and advertising English casinos might be better.
Thanks James for keeping the forum clean, it must be quite annoying to have to delete every spam thread.
I second this “thanks”. This should not even be something that James has to deal with. How have the power’s above not noticed the problem and closed creation of all new accounts …
My best guess is that they search the web for certain keywords, requested by their “advertisers” and, when they find a target soft enough they just blanket it with spam. While circumventing some site software may be fully automated, for some of the sites there might be a “human touch” in a form of solving a stubborn CAPTCHAs to create an account. Then it is fully automated.
Do not click on any of their links!!! That’s how they are get paid. It is so cheap for them to launch an attack that even if there is a 10 cents paid for each of 15 clicks they get after flooding this site for an entire evening they still are making money.
There are usually underground forums and exchanges setup to hook up “advertisers” and “service providers”. You will be surprised how much B2B-type automation there is.
Many of the people who are doing that are teenagers and young adults from East European and Asian countries with lack of money and basic ethical values. It is sad to watch how many people are wasting they talent doing this stuff.
Yes, count me too. Thank you, James, for doing this. I am sure we could deploy our own friendly bots to fight the spam bots while James could spend his time doing something much more useful.
First off, I’d like to apologize for not being able to personally monitor the forum for these spam accounts. I started my Christmas vacation a few days early, and have been away from my computer for most of today.
Second, I’d like to thank @jpearman for his efforts in keeping the forum clean in my absence. It’s great to see such dedication in keeping our forum clear for other users.
After some investigation into what has happened today, we discovered that a lot of the spam had been coming from a single IP address, and have since took appropriate action. In addition, we have also installed another plugin that should further increase spam prevention.
For the time being, we are suspending the ability to freely create an account and post. Until we can implement some additional security, all accounts must be verified by a moderator before they will be allowed to post. (If there are any urgent matters in creating an account, please find a way to start a private conversation with me on the forum, and I will approve the account as soon as I can.)
Please know that our forum management team will be looking into ways to prevent spam attacks such as these from happening again. I and the rest of the VEX staff sincerely appreciate your feedback and concerns.
I am wondering how the most recent attack this morning took place. It was stated last night that all new accounts would have to be approved by moderators. Apparently it still slipped through?
Yes, that account must have been created before we made the change to the forum settings last night. Assuming no other spam accounts were created before then, this should have been the last one.
Can we give a couple old and loyal accounts the ability to delete a conversation until we kill the spam bots? If that is too much power then the “elder” accounts can vote to remove a conversation and if a conversation gets 10 votes or some other number then it is deleted. Just an idea to take the load off the moderators…
So I did some research (not too heavy) and a very good point that I found was that even with the best plugins to stop spambots, cheap labor employees can basically blow right through any capchatca or plugins unless you have vex specific questions like the ones above or “how many buttons are on the joystick” and “what are the maximum legal motors to have on a robot?”
The thing is, we didn’t have this much spam until we came to the new forums and the old forum didn’t require a VEX specific question. I think it is ok to expect a small amount of spam to get through…we just need to get it down to that small level on this new forum.
I worry a little bit about VEX specific questions because I think about some of my new team members trying to create an account. Many kids are way to impatient to look for the answer if they don’t know it. They will just move on and never give the VEX forum a second thought.
That is the main problem with the idea but with the new person friendly questions it might work and it’s better than the below happening from an even more powerful robot. I’m definitely not suggesting that we implement the question when there is no robots getting through but it makes for a decent plan Y (don’t ask what plan Z is)
