I have a site hosted on one of my servers that has a phpBB installation. The admin for the board had basically walked away from the site.
Anyone who's worked with phpBB, or any forum for that matter - knows that it's like crack cocaine for spammers - they love that crap. So while moving sites off this old server, I noticed it was still there. I logged in and HOLY SH^T it's the spamocalypse in there. I think just one of the sections had like 8k new posts. Of course, any legitimate users had no doubt been driven away.
So I closed it down. But just before I did the rm -rf to dump the boards, I thought - perhaps there's something useful here? So I just put an htaccess password on it instead to keep the spammers out, as well as any SEO benefit they may get from google spidering all that crap.
At the very least there's a wealth of IP addresses and email addresses used by spammers. And perhaps much more - after all many of the posts are basically the same thing over and over, usually porn. It seems like it might be somehow useful for some sort of anti-spam tool. And it doesn't cost me to hang onto it, at least for now. Althought the mysql dump file was over 1 gig in size, which gives you an idea as to just how much spam is in that puppy.
So, if you have any ideas, let me. Otherwise it'll probably just take up a bit of disk space until I decide I'll never get around to using it for anything.
Anyone who's worked with phpBB, or any forum for that matter - knows that it's like crack cocaine for spammers - they love that crap. So while moving sites off this old server, I noticed it was still there. I logged in and HOLY SH^T it's the spamocalypse in there. I think just one of the sections had like 8k new posts. Of course, any legitimate users had no doubt been driven away.
So I closed it down. But just before I did the rm -rf to dump the boards, I thought - perhaps there's something useful here? So I just put an htaccess password on it instead to keep the spammers out, as well as any SEO benefit they may get from google spidering all that crap.
At the very least there's a wealth of IP addresses and email addresses used by spammers. And perhaps much more - after all many of the posts are basically the same thing over and over, usually porn. It seems like it might be somehow useful for some sort of anti-spam tool. And it doesn't cost me to hang onto it, at least for now. Althought the mysql dump file was over 1 gig in size, which gives you an idea as to just how much spam is in that puppy.
So, if you have any ideas, let me. Otherwise it'll probably just take up a bit of disk space until I decide I'll never get around to using it for anything.
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