09-20-2013, 08:47 PM
I dig how this is a three-year old thread...
Anyhow, the war on spammers never ends. As time has gone by, they get increasingly coordinated in their methods, just as forum software keeps updating to fight the battle. If you've been monitoring the Lounge much lately, you've noticed a sharp uptick in spam as the previous methods to trap and fight them were failing to keep up.
There are several automatic checks in place here that mostly come into play when users activate. I won't get into much detail, but the server runs out to well-maintained spambot-fighting sites to compare every registration against known spammers, both from IP address and content patterns of their registrations (usernames, profile details, etc). The really good spammers randomize this stuff pretty well, so it's a neverending war to adapt to what they're doing. This is why 100% spam prevention is completely impossible.
"So just ban everyone registering from Russia or China," the naive poster may think. Not so fast. The good spammers all use botnets from infected machines worldwide, so IP address spamming is essentially useless.
As I was saying, most of the protection is on the registration side, and that's been a weakness lately. The latest spam attack we've been suffering from here is due to a botnet that registered hundreds of accounts over the span of a few days before their new registrations started getting filtered out from the spammer-detection algorithms. Problem is, by that point it's too late, and I've been in here multiple times a day banning and clearing out posts.
A few changes have been made today, and this may have affected a legitimate user or two around here.
1) Extra protection has been put into place on the spammer registration side to make it even more secure. Details will not be provided. Fun fact: if there was no spammer protection on registrations, there would be well over 100 spambot registrations per day and the forum would be useless.
2) User pruning is now heavily in force and is automated. This fights the spambots that register lots of accounts and then sit on them for weeks, sometimes even months, before using them to spam up a forum. Once you register, you have three days to activate the registration via email. Once you activate, you have one week to make a post or you're gone.
Today, over 4000 user accounts have been deleted, and I'm sure that there were some legitimate user accounts that were sacrificed. People who may have registered to read guild forums, especially - yet never posted - may have been knocked off. I do apologize for this, and hope they understand if they need to re-register (and post a "hi" post in their guild forum / public chat to stay a member).
The end result for the spammers is, if they do manage to get past anti-spammer registration rules, they have seven days to post their spam and get banned or their account gets auto-nuked. Chances are, attempting to register again at that point will get blocked because the anti-spam registration rules will be filtering them by then. Also, the member listing here gets a little less crazy because there won't be any spambots in the members lists older than a week.
Again, apologies to anyone who may have lost a legitimate account here today, but I'm sure they'll understand the necessity to keep this place clean.
Anyhow, the war on spammers never ends. As time has gone by, they get increasingly coordinated in their methods, just as forum software keeps updating to fight the battle. If you've been monitoring the Lounge much lately, you've noticed a sharp uptick in spam as the previous methods to trap and fight them were failing to keep up.
There are several automatic checks in place here that mostly come into play when users activate. I won't get into much detail, but the server runs out to well-maintained spambot-fighting sites to compare every registration against known spammers, both from IP address and content patterns of their registrations (usernames, profile details, etc). The really good spammers randomize this stuff pretty well, so it's a neverending war to adapt to what they're doing. This is why 100% spam prevention is completely impossible.
"So just ban everyone registering from Russia or China," the naive poster may think. Not so fast. The good spammers all use botnets from infected machines worldwide, so IP address spamming is essentially useless.
As I was saying, most of the protection is on the registration side, and that's been a weakness lately. The latest spam attack we've been suffering from here is due to a botnet that registered hundreds of accounts over the span of a few days before their new registrations started getting filtered out from the spammer-detection algorithms. Problem is, by that point it's too late, and I've been in here multiple times a day banning and clearing out posts.
A few changes have been made today, and this may have affected a legitimate user or two around here.
1) Extra protection has been put into place on the spammer registration side to make it even more secure. Details will not be provided. Fun fact: if there was no spammer protection on registrations, there would be well over 100 spambot registrations per day and the forum would be useless.
2) User pruning is now heavily in force and is automated. This fights the spambots that register lots of accounts and then sit on them for weeks, sometimes even months, before using them to spam up a forum. Once you register, you have three days to activate the registration via email. Once you activate, you have one week to make a post or you're gone.
Today, over 4000 user accounts have been deleted, and I'm sure that there were some legitimate user accounts that were sacrificed. People who may have registered to read guild forums, especially - yet never posted - may have been knocked off. I do apologize for this, and hope they understand if they need to re-register (and post a "hi" post in their guild forum / public chat to stay a member).
The end result for the spammers is, if they do manage to get past anti-spammer registration rules, they have seven days to post their spam and get banned or their account gets auto-nuked. Chances are, attempting to register again at that point will get blocked because the anti-spam registration rules will be filtering them by then. Also, the member listing here gets a little less crazy because there won't be any spambots in the members lists older than a week.
Again, apologies to anyone who may have lost a legitimate account here today, but I'm sure they'll understand the necessity to keep this place clean.
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.