Helpful Coder

Every now and then you'll run across this - spammers dumping large amounts of apparentl gibberish in to comments, forums, etc. It's very strange - it's not code, and there's no links or anything else of apparent use to the spammer. So why do they bother? I have a couple theories. One possibility is that it is a malfunctioning bot. That's kind of fun to imagine, but seems unlikely. Thinking about how a spam bot would be coded, I'd think it more likely to leave empty comments if something was wrong then long strings of gibberish. The other possibility is that the bot is actually leaving a "fingerprint" in the form of a unique text string. The spammer can then check his work later by just doing a google search for this text. If the spam comes up it tells him several useful things: His bot worked and left a message The message was not deleted/moderated The page that was spammed is indexed by google It'd be possible to have a second automated bot do t...

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...

Combine a huge new botnet that's sending 500k pieces of spam a day with the fact that many of the captchas protecting sites like gmail and hotmail from automated spammers - and you get a spam bonanza. Yummy!

This is a system I've been working for for probably a couple years now total. It runs on a fairly busy site, and is meant to prevent comment spam. The comment system itself uses flat files, and is a custom-coded ColdFusion system, built to order. I'm not a huge fan of ColdFusion - it seems like everything I try to do with it is about twice as difficult as it should be - perhaps I'm just too used to PHP and Perl. Anyways, I'm going to give a general overview of the system. I can't post code, because the code belongs to the client. But perhaps the general idea of the system will be enough to be helpful to someone out there. So, when someone leaves a comment, it's immediately visible and an email is sent to the admin, so he knows and can take action if the comment is spam. That worked fine for far longer than you'd expect, but eventually the spammers found it and started bombarding him with crap. So, the first line of defense we added was quite simple - it bloc...

Well, on the most popular forum I run I've finally bitten the bullet and done to manual moderation of all new members. The damn spammers go through the captcha like it's nothing these days, and despite an ever-increasing banlist of IP ranges and email addresses, they keep coming. I'm using phpBB (not the new one) so my moderation tools are pretty limited. I'm sure that's there's modules and whatnot out there, but I figure since I'm likely going to be upgrading to the new version at some point, there's not much point in messing with that. Plus I have a fair amount of customization on the forum, and I'd rather not mess that up until needed. I think there's a few different things leading to this new storm of spammers. First, I think it's obvious that they've figured some way around captcha style "prove your human" tests. Or they're just hiring "sweat shop spammers" to do it manually, and training them to decode the ca...

I've got a couple forums I help run, and dealing with spammers is a recurring problem. They either want to get an account with a link their site in their profile, or they want to active post spam in the forums - or both. There's been a bit of an upsurge in the little bastards lately, apparently they're getting through the "image verification" systems more easily now - or they're just going the sweatshop route and having humans make the accounts. Either way, it's a pain. What I've taken to doing is setting the forums so that the users must be approved before their active. With phpBB I also had to modify the code so that the user list only shows active users - for some reason it showed inactive users by default before! So even if they'd never clicked the activation link, they'd still get the url in their profile on the forum's user list. So now, when I'm going through the list of new users to be moderated, I follow these steps: Check th...