Thus see the spambots hitting MYBB forums. Visiting another sig or two here it seems i am not the only one getting hit with them.
Anyone else been getting hit with them lately? This past week has been the worst. Thankfully i have registration set to admin approval. Thus that is as far as they get.
I'm starting to think most of the spam isn't coming from "bots" any more, it seems like a human is behind a lot of the spam these days. I might be wrong but I suspect it has reached a point where it is cheaper to hire labour from developing nations than to develop algorithms to crack anti-spam measures and automate the process.
The fact that they are humans and not bots makes it very difficult to counter and really the only options are to either make it more efficient to deal with spam or to use blacklist style services such as SFS which unfortunately are prone to blocking legitimate visitors.
(2011-04-02, 03:06 AM)Tim B. Wrote: [ -> ]I'm starting to think most of the spam isn't coming from "bots" any more, it seems like a human is behind a lot of the spam these days. I might be wrong but I suspect it has reached a point where it is cheaper to hire labour from developing nations than to develop algorithms to crack anti-spam measures and automate the process.
The fact that they are humans and not bots makes it very difficult to counter and really the only options are to either make it more efficient to deal with spam or to use blacklist style services such as SFS which unfortunately are prone to blocking legitimate visitors.
I have been banning the IP's. Have a good IP checker. I always have and always will check every single registration on my forums. I had trouble in the past and thus why i do it. Nearly all of them have used some free email service as well which i stopped accepting long ago. The .uk.yahoo ( or whatever it is ) seems to be the one of choice recently. If they are in a related field ( weather in my case ) they can use their business addy/email. Same applies to the government/.edu addresses which can be used. If they live outside North America they are to email me stating their interest. The site is about weather for this part of the world and thus not much use for anyone else. All is welcome ofcourse as i do know *some* have a interest in the weather here.
Have any other suggestions feel free to share them.
lol at banning users using free e-mail addresses. talk about shooting yourself in the foot. a lot of people are using gmail/hotmail these days even if they have .edu or whatever due to the superior web interfaces.
you're dealing with humans, not bots. delete the posts, ban the users, move on with your life. it sucks but there isn't much to be done about it, is there?
On my busiest forums I've noticed that more than 90% of spam comes from India. Setting up mod_geoip and .htaccess would fix it.
(2011-04-02, 03:06 AM)Tim B. Wrote: [ -> ]I'm starting to think most of the spam isn't coming from "bots" any more, it seems like a human is behind a lot of the spam these days. I might be wrong but I suspect it has reached a point where it is cheaper to hire labour from developing nations than to develop algorithms to crack anti-spam measures and automate the process.
The fact that they are humans and not bots makes it very difficult to counter and really the only options are to either make it more efficient to deal with spam or to use blacklist style services such as SFS which unfortunately are prone to blocking legitimate visitors.
I see the human spammers comment more and more here on mybb. And i personally think it's nonsense. Fact however is that MyBB has the current captcha for at least one and a half year (since i started my forum) and that registrations and posts were coming through already back then. It was the first thing i modified when i started my forum.
Without using one of the anti-spam plugins i hardly have spam registrations/ posts on my forum, maybe 1 or 2 a month. It's a captcha issue. Plain and simple imho.
Oh, I should point out that the 2 busiest forums I mentioned are vB forums. I've never had an issue with spam with MyBB, even without anti-spam plugins.
Block all the developing countries (middle east and china... there's probably a premade list of IP ranges somewhere), ad companies usually don't pay for their traffic anyway. The remaining 2% can be dealt with by your forum staff.
I find most use gmail. Usually random emails. So I put email activation on and that stops a fair few. I had 3000 users awaiting activation last month.
Spambots and humans can beat e-mail activation. I found few spambots that can beat randomly generated passwords being e-mailed to them with a custom e-mail template.