Spammies Awakening

M

MikeMpls

Well-known member
Anyone else notice a surge in user counts due to spammies trying to register the last 2-3 days?

Forums that barely break a hundreds users at peak times have been hitting 150, a couple were > 100 on a Sunday morning.

Fortunately, thanks mostly to XenUtiles & KepCaptcha, they ain't gettin' in.

& speaking of spammies, I cleared out my logs of rejected registrations (threshold is set at two items matched from {name, email, IP}) from XenUtils for the first time Thanksgiving (that's late November for you Europeans who ancestors help to inspire the holiday): approx. 704,000 rejected registrations in 7 forums. Just think of what 704,000 spammies loose in your forums could do ... :eek:
 
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I see very specific spam attacks that we also see here on xenforo.com
The spam posted are texts filled with spam links.
The software used for this type of spam attacks seems to look for websites with the XenForo copyright line in the footer.
 
It's even worse when you run phpBB. My current phpBB forum (soon to be XF...!) has blocked 726000 since February, since I last had to truncate the table because it was causing timeouts! In two months less time, we've gotten as many spammers as you have :o

Thank goodness for anti-spam mods, because phpBB's default spam facilities simply don't exist.
 
Brogan said:
I don't use anything other than Q&A for registration and user group promotion after the first 5 posts, which means there has never been a single spam post on my installation.
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I do the same except for the moderating of the first 5 posts which we don't currently do (we're only a small forum). The Q&A for registration means I've not had so far any spam registrations. I've seen bots trying to register when I look at the Current Visitors list (i.e. showing Registering, meaning they are at least looking at the registration page) but not one has got through (so far anyway!)
 
My SFS log has 126.000 entries since last month.
My Bad Behavior log shows 123.000 attempts in the last 7 days.

These two systems together block pretty much all spam.
 
Brogan said:
I don't use anything other than Q&A for registration and user group promotion after the first 5 posts, which means there has never been a single spam post on my installation.
Click to expand...

Heh, I hope you don't ask how many oxygen atoms are in 354,75 kg of concentrated sulfuric acid.
 
Site was getting slow.... Turns out our log have over 1 1/2 million entries.

They keep trying, but I finally found away to keep them spammers out :)
 
Brogan said:
Maybe it's me but I don't care how many unsuccessful spammer registration attempts there have been on my site.

No doubt it is a rather large figure but it's not a metric I feel inclined to track.
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Agreed, much more valuable metric is the successful spammers, as those should prompt you to action.
 
Brogan said:
Maybe it's me but I don't care how many unsuccessful spammer registration attempts there have been on my site.

No doubt it is a rather large figure but it's not a metric I feel inclined to track.
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Many of us pay for bandwidth, and in a VPS environment you also pay for a slice of the CPU. The resources that they steal are not "free".

In a shared server environment ("unlimited" never really is :(), I could also see the spammies ramping up your resource utilization to the unwelcome point if you are running multiple small forums out of the same account (which is what I do: 3 earn money & the others are of no consequence, but the spammies don't differentiate).

I became essentially personal non grata in a shared-hosting environment because of a popular thread in one board, but I can easily see this happening to someone trying to support several small boards.
 
Logging unsuccessful attempts doesn't stop them using the bandwidth or resources though.

They still go through the registration process like any other visitor signing up.
 
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