The subject line says it all. The forum suffers from this problem like no other popular forum I've ever visited. It's because it allows brand new members to post their garbage un-vetted. I made the suggestion that the first one or two posts of a brand new member should be reviewed before making it visible on the forum. There may be a technical solution that I'm not aware of; my suggestion is only a suggestion. Either way, what ever is happening now is not working.
I dislike that because then respected members from other websites who want to post tutorials here and such would have to make 10 potentially useless posts to get the ability to link to the files in his or her tutorial.
.. what respected members? .. people who are senior or respected elsewhere tend to avoid lazy noob central. I do have a point.. ask around.. but linking to your own site or guide is no more than spam.. I stuffed up spammers by allowing only 3 links per post.. don't know why the owners can't apply a decent word filter tho.. easy way to kill emails posted in forums and the better known spammer items. they don't seem to listen to suggestions tho.. been suggesting a basic word list based post block filter for ages.. nothing happens..
Not always. A tutorial I wrote has links that go outside of afterdawn because I've never been a member here. The images are hosted on my friend's web server and many file downloads come from various other servers. I think this forum is crippled enough with the limited BBCode (no or [size] tags). Then again this is just my opinion, just like you have your own opinion. Everyone's entitled to have one.
Well some of the other site's do it, but it takes a bit of work. I think it's some derivative of my first point, they don't allow the first 2 or 3 posts of any new members to appear until it is first reviewed by a moderator. Seems it would be simple to do here. Lets face it, this place is not as busy as it once was.
Actually dave.. once implemented every post needs moderator approval all the time. I have belonged to sites like that and it quickly gets abused by the opinions and views of the moderators resulting in people not only going away but badmouthing the site to similar places. What should be done is getting the main index to update properly so removed spam posts don't sit there as the latest topic for days and days and days.. poor coding. The old site was the same.. some things never change.. seems the database is slow or too stupid to refresh itself. A for offsite links to programs or other site postings.. n00bs shouldn't be allowed to post those anyway.. don't people understand the serious malware risk by allowing anybody to post a direct download link or offsite location link?? ? Somebody like me could screw over a lot of people with a simple get it here type link in a guide. Click that at your peril.. it might still be live. I take no responsibility if people don't read the warning.. xxxxxx It's a well known way to get people to connect to "driveby malware" sites. I know a lot of these spambots, they all tend to use the same webmail servers or custom ones to register... or they hijack the account used by the infected windoze machine.. hehehehe... It's pretty easy to kill 99% with an email restriction list and a word filter.. the remaining ones are the determined ones run by real people who have better things to do than wonder why they can't post something with xillisoft in the title or body. A bunch of us with our own sites meet up once a week and share our blocklists.. together we must have blocked a good 60% of the free webmail domains for persistent spamming. There are other ways, but I think nobody has looked closely at the methods, or they certainly haven't implemented them. My bots have no trouble registering accounts here whereas they fail on my site because it has a few "traps" in the registration form designed to catch bots. It's such an easy target I have to hard script an exclusion to stop them posting or joining up here.. I'm not going into detail because I don't want to give the botfarmers.. well the script kiddie botfarmers anyway.. any more info than they have already. some spam is interesting anyway.. I got spammed from meezmall once.. good fun thing, free and harmless. You know times are hard when skilled people have to turn to spambots to make some cash for essentials... So now explain why html is disabled again??.. for the hard of thinking get cheap viagra best dvd ripper
Hi paula, I see what you mean, but it's not exactly what I meant. My point was that all new sign-ups (no posting history) should have the first few posts reviewed by a moderator before it becomes visible on the forum. After that, assuming the posts were legit, treat them the way most established members are treated. How are they detected now? Some suspicious subject line? Random checking on new users? In any event the moderators usually suspend the member. What you suggest regarding botnets is interesting. Many of the sites use the recapcha challenges when a new membership is obtained. Do they do that here, it would certainly help. I had always assumed it wasn't a bot, but just opportunistic individuals zealously plugging their products. (Usually there is a bit of misleading verbiage to go along with the sales job!)
They get busted when they post spam.. the humans anyway.. bots can be scripted to quote the previous post.. their giveaway is usually bad spelling/grammar as the script kiddies don't speak decent english to start with.. They can even get around the moderators in that system very easily.. heres how to do it.. webmaster know how coming up... Sign up.. have no sig or anything like that.. don't build a homepage. Make a few nice enough posts maybe just "thanks, useful.. will try that" etc.. wait for moderator approval and let them sit there until somebody else posts to the thread.. then come along and edit it with the intended spam.. if you have made say 100 posts over a few days you could really make a good spam attack.. the mods have checked your posts, and found they are all fine so unless you are unlucky you likely won't get caught for quite a while. option 2 is similar but gets caught quicker.. post the same number to get the restriction on links and posts lifted.. then spam the place to hell along with editing all your previous posts.. drop the spam links in your sig or change your sig as well.. it's possible to script bots to do this too.. just takes time and care and running bots which are robust enough to survive in individual instances on exploited remote machines for long enough to actually manage the wait between the original post limit time and the lifting of restrictions.. but.. it would only take 1% of 50k bots to do a lot of damage in a very short time.. Check my post above.. theres no n00b timelimit on editing posts... It's possible to write bots which only send private messages.. those are fun, they run an internal ddos type attack by jamming up the server mail service causing the site to slow right down.. done and tested and works.. needed 17k bots all messaging each other for 2 days, deleting their inboxes after reply to not get caught.. to clog it all up.. Nice to know the hosts mailserver queue limit bottleneck is about 700k mails an hour. Haven't tested the new setup.. probably been blocked with a pm limit because I didn't exactly make a secret of the test.. Somebody is running one of my captured bots now.. they are using it to spam some pointless dvd ripper/converter instead of it's intended shoes and fashion target.. I have a bot honeypot setup.. I capture other peoples bots too can be spotted with my usual naming convention.. 4 letter upper or lowercase randomised name followed by 3 or 4 numbers.. scum101 was a bot made account.. got to senior member.. shows how robust a bot on a remote system can be... it started to get email problems after nearly a year alive in the wild though I posted from my home so the mods knew it was me and not the (post content) disabled bot. Hmmm.. that gives me an idea.. better shut up now.. I know a site that needs teaching a lesson for encouraging and supporting blatant religious bigotry and abuse of the membership. I think a few scientology links and spam would go down well there.. hahahaha
