Stop Forum Spam announce removal of Xen utilities users

pedigree said:
Im not one of the bad guys. i make no money from SFS, I do it for the love of sticking one to the spammers. The more spammers I piss off, the better. You guys help me do that, so its a high-5 both ways.
Click to expand...
Very good post. Brings a smile on my face. :):barefoot:
 
Stop Forum Spam provides a wonderful, useful, and free service. Beggars can not be choosers and so I don't hold any bad feelings toward them. If we were paying for it... That would be another matter, but we're not and it's free.
 
I've been yelled at by "pedigree" before, and been told how good I have it. I guess you have to put up with a little abuse at times to use the service. I don't have a problem with that.
 
Look. we can all accuse everyone who owns a forum or a service that there is some fault at hand. Rather than wasting our time and energy arguing about abusive language, or abuse of services, let's just do what we do best. Innovate.

If Pedigree is up for revising SFS, then let's contribute ideas and potential data points in which could contribute to the fighting of spam and the minimizing of both false negatives and false positives.
 
AlexT said:
Abuse? What about 3rd party tools abusing his services by polluting them with false positives? Seriously, he should start charging for his services.
Click to expand...

my experience was a long time ago, and he apologized, no issue there. I agree, he should start charging, or get bought.

The fact that he'll send emails out when the TOS changes is a great start.
 
Carlos said:
Yes! I am concerned. :mad:
Let's block everyone using xenUtilities and call it a day, SFS (StopForumSpam) . Let's see how xenForo users react next time. :mad:
Click to expand...
I do not use SFS or XenUtils, and have no problem with automated spambots, and the few human spammers I get I can deal with. For me personally, I will not use a blacklist service until I exhausted all other possibilities, cause the privacy issues are very real. I have used such services before, but then I checked against 10 or so databases, and weighed each one, and set a pain treshold for blocking. It worked, but since that I have discovered other methods that works equally well, and I am more at ease not sharing my users info with 3rd parties. For now my Q&A seems to hold them at base, when that changes, I will just update my questions.

Jaxel said:
AlexT, in america, email addresses, IP addresses and usernames are not protected personal information... its why the police can retrieve all that info without warrants and stuff.
Click to expand...
In European countries this is very different, at least in some. In Norway you need special permissions to store that kind of data. AlexT raises a valid point, almost every standard Privacy policy contains some parts about sharing their information (and most defaults to that "we don't"). And with the internet being international, it is very easy to suddenly fall under foreign law for some reason or another (it could be as simple as you have prices in a local currency for products you sell).
 
This is still an ongoing issue but now its really starting to piss me off. Repeat offenders, who continue to submit fake/false data will be publicly named and will have their access to the API completely removed, not just submitting via a bad API key which has been happening so far.

I wouldnt normally go this far but this abuse has become an intolerable waste of my time and those of innocent people caught up in this mess

Edit - sorry for rant, hindsight is great. If you are running XenUtiles 1.1.6 (or above) then please ignore anything (and maybe everything) that I have said :)
 
For querying, no. Unlike other sites, we allow access without having to have an API key but if it continues, who knows what this minority might cause us to do.

For submitting, yes, and Im removing all their keys.
 
pedigree said:
This is still an ongoing issue but now its really starting to piss me off. Repeat offenders, who continue to submit fake/false data will be publicly named and will have their access to the API completely removed, not just submitting via a bad API key which has been happening so far.

I wouldnt normally go this far but this abuse has become an intolerable waste of my time and those of innocent people caught up in this mess
Click to expand...

JW is this only a XenForo problem?
 
pedigree said:
For querying, no. Unlike other sites, we allow access without having to have an API key but if it continues, who knows what this minority might cause us to do.

For submitting, yes, and Im removing all their keys.
Click to expand...
I'm guessing the issue stems from users using older versions of XenUtilis?
 
pedigree said:
This is still an ongoing issue but now its really starting to piss me off. Repeat offenders, who continue to submit fake/false data will be publicly named and will have their access to the API completely removed, not just submitting via a bad API key which has been happening so far.

I wouldnt normally go this far but this abuse has become an intolerable waste of my time and those of innocent people caught up in this mess
Click to expand...

How can we as users of the service make sure we are not submitting false data? We use XenUtiles and updated as soon as the issue was announced.
 
pedigree said:
This is still an ongoing issue but now its really starting to piss me off.
Click to expand...

Pedigree, I really like your service and donated a few times. But your rant is disturbing. Why should we as normal users guess what/who you exactly mean? Do you mean me? Do you mean other users? Do you mean users using an old addon? Do you mean.....?
Why not get in contact with the offenders directly?
 
If you have updated in the last month, then you are not submitting false data.

If you have the ability to submit failed registration forms or matching data based on existing assumptions, then you likely to be submitting false data.

When a report is submitted, the site owner is emailed informing them of what has happened, what the submissions have to be removed and that they should upgrade the plugin. All of the sites in question, have been submitting for a while and have quite a large submission count, hence why I believe its an old version of the plugin. As I do not have XenForo, I cannot be exactly sure what exact versions people should be running. Maybe you could help me out there so that I can put that into the email to site admins.

I dont mean to rant but XenForo Utiles submissions are taking almost all of the spare time that I have, when I could be spending it coding new features and building the new servers. Its a time sink :( While Jaxel fixed his plugin quickly, lots of people running it don't read the official forums often (if ever) or twitter

Again, please update your XenForo Utiles plugin, keep it up to date. If you have updated in the last month, then you should be fine but I have no way to manually check all API keys sites and submissions and its only when I get a flurry of abusive reports, swearing, cursing, threatening and all the rest, that I have to then start going through peoples submissions. I dont like removing them, but it is necessary so that you don't start blocking innocent users

If someone could provide exact versions or a dev site where I can check code, then please do contact me so that I can be 100% specific of version X is bad, and version Y is good. Then everyone can be certain, without confusion, about the situation.

Back to it, Ive just had another report come in :(
 
Totally hypothetical.... could it be some of the warez sites that might be the problem? I know XenForo Utiles is a very popular and widely distributed plugin among the warez sites.
 
We are running the latest version of XenUtiles, 1.1.6 and we were previously running 1.1.5 which had been out for quite some time, looks like 1.1.5 may have been released in January 2012.

The site we are using it on is in my signature, if you need anything, I don't mind giving you access. Currently have 471 pages of rejected registrations (20 per page) since Aug 21, 2012.
 

Similar threads

NealC
Stop Forum Spam moderating users with normal first names only
Replies
2
Views
323
StarArmy
StarArmy
Moddis
  • Question Question
XF 1.2 Use Stop Forum Spam and Project Honey Pot at same time
Replies
4
Views
6K
Moddis
Moddis
island
What is the status of the standalone stop forum spam plugin?
Replies
2
Views
2K
island
island
Top Bottom