Do I have an enemy? Or does XenForo have an enemy? Or is this just the work of a random hooligan?
I wonder if it was directed more at me as a XenForo user and perhaps there will be other XenForo targets, since the attack originated in the UK, and only ~2.5% of my traffic comes from the UK (USA accounts for 91%).
Around 7:39 yesterday (Friday) morning, someone at a UK IP address first abstracted my AdSense code from the HTML and posted it visibly on the site (clearly indicating he was targeting my ads), then proceeded to pollute roughly a dozen threads with profanities, porno pics & a videos, and links to adult (mostly) and warez web sites. The posts were obviously contrived to pack as many AdSense policy violations into as little space as possible, and spread throughout a dozen threads in three subforums. All this happened somewhat before 8 a.m. here Friday morning, about 12:40 p.m. GMT.
I'd gotten home from work about 5 a.m., went to bed about 7, back at work for afternoon meetings & stuff. By the time I saw my emails in the late afternoon, ads were already shut off to the site. There was no 72 hour warning. Google had actually shut them off about 3 hours after the attack.
I slunk off to test station in the corner of our lab where I could clean up the mess without anyone else having to view the rubbish, checking the IP of each item as I deleted it, and modifying the filters as I went.
I ended up importing my profanity filters from another XF site (where certain users had resisted giving up their God-given right to swear), added the names of common porn/warez sites to the spam filters, flagged everything to be moderated, and got my appeal filed. I plan to add to the filters over the weekend.
Before forewarned, the bozo is out there & will probably hit someone else if he hasn't already. The attack originated from IP 92.25.158.140, in an IP block assigned to Talk Talk PLC, which appears to be a very large UK ISP located in a 'burb just north of London. I did lodge a complaint w/ Talk Talk's abuse emails & with their technical & administrative contacts, and I plan further to block all of their IP ranges from my sites -- their share of that 2.5% UK traffic is hardly worth the potential loss of $2K or more in revenues annually.
I wonder if it was directed more at me as a XenForo user and perhaps there will be other XenForo targets, since the attack originated in the UK, and only ~2.5% of my traffic comes from the UK (USA accounts for 91%).
Around 7:39 yesterday (Friday) morning, someone at a UK IP address first abstracted my AdSense code from the HTML and posted it visibly on the site (clearly indicating he was targeting my ads), then proceeded to pollute roughly a dozen threads with profanities, porno pics & a videos, and links to adult (mostly) and warez web sites. The posts were obviously contrived to pack as many AdSense policy violations into as little space as possible, and spread throughout a dozen threads in three subforums. All this happened somewhat before 8 a.m. here Friday morning, about 12:40 p.m. GMT.
I'd gotten home from work about 5 a.m., went to bed about 7, back at work for afternoon meetings & stuff. By the time I saw my emails in the late afternoon, ads were already shut off to the site. There was no 72 hour warning. Google had actually shut them off about 3 hours after the attack.
I slunk off to test station in the corner of our lab where I could clean up the mess without anyone else having to view the rubbish, checking the IP of each item as I deleted it, and modifying the filters as I went.
I ended up importing my profanity filters from another XF site (where certain users had resisted giving up their God-given right to swear), added the names of common porn/warez sites to the spam filters, flagged everything to be moderated, and got my appeal filed. I plan to add to the filters over the weekend.
Before forewarned, the bozo is out there & will probably hit someone else if he hasn't already. The attack originated from IP 92.25.158.140, in an IP block assigned to Talk Talk PLC, which appears to be a very large UK ISP located in a 'burb just north of London. I did lodge a complaint w/ Talk Talk's abuse emails & with their technical & administrative contacts, and I plan further to block all of their IP ranges from my sites -- their share of that 2.5% UK traffic is hardly worth the potential loss of $2K or more in revenues annually.
Unfortunately I hadn't noticed that the list of IP blocks was a list of the company's other IP ranges, so the creep was able to get back in. That's fixed but the damage was accomplished Friday -- Google refuses to restore ads, but with their customarily non-existent customer service (no-reply emails & busted "contact us" form), they won't tell me what all those problems are that they claim to know about.
