Only with my curiosity....

[Mr Monkey]

I've noticed that the newest member username is sometimes either suspiciously like a company name, eg BobsLowCostTires or more recently conforms to a standard, name_place, with the name being somewhere in America (normally in the South) eg Bert_Texas, Kim_Alabama, Alice_Kentucky etc.

These users never post etc and it seems to me that there maybe an ulterior motive to signing up to this website. I know if you get your website linked to others (especially big ones) you can get pushed up Google rankings but is there any such value in being signed to a website (rather than directly linked)?

I'm doing a few courses on Web Dev and it'd be interesting if anyone had any ideas/thoughts.

[GilesC]

As a moderator on another forum, I can tell you that spammers usually sign up with names or email addresses that are often recognisable as being spammers (or their IP address indicates they're definitely on the list of "highly likely to be a spammer"). Just signing up won't really give them any advantage, it's only if they manage to get posts on the public forums, and they go on the basis that some forums are not well moderated and their posts will be visible, even if for a few days. However, on the forum I moderate we have measures in place, like on project meditation, that means a new members posts won't be immediately visible on the forum until they've been approved by a moderator, so those that try and spam are quickly spotted and their account terminated (on a few rare occassions we've had to block the IP addresses). So, whilst people can see these members joining up due to the forums saying something like "Welcome to our newest member SteveRichard88888", that's as far as they get, and it's no use to them.



Giles

[Mr Monkey]

Thanks for that Giles, most interesting. I had always assumed that the “under moderation” bit was just to make sure people weren’t going to be offensive etc, but I can see how it’d be a good buffer to prevent other misuse.

I know this is a little off topic for meditation, but I am intrigued, how can you effectively block the IP address? How could that work? Wouldn’t the spammers IP’s be changed (dynamically supplied at connection time by the ISP) every time the reconnected to the internet, so if you blocked xyz, next time the connect they get assigned abc making the block irrelevant?

The only exceptions I can think of would be if the spammers had a static IP through the ISP, they kept a constant connection through the ISP (so keeping the same ISP supplied IP address) or they had a direct connection to the internet. All of these would be fairly easy to trace so not the cleverest way to do annoying/stupid things. Perhaps you ask the ISP to block “the user using IP xyz at time 12:34:56” from having access to the site?

If you have time I’d be interested to hear how it’s done.

Also, thanks moderators! I never realized that this work was being done behind the scenes to keep the forum ‘clean’, nice one .

[GilesC]

In general, yes the spammers IP's do change, though we do get some spammers (and abusive members) who keep signing up with new emails but from the same IP. Not sure of the technicalities of how the IP is banned, as we just notify the site administrator and he does it, so it's only something that's done where there's a consistent IP address, and that's not that often. The administrator has also linked the sign up process to the stopforumspam.com website so it automatically checks registration details to see if they've already been reported as a spammer elsewhere.

There's various patterns that can be watched out for for spammers, including the style in which they word their posts. Unfortunately (without discrimination) a lot of the spamming comes from certain countries... India, Pakistan, China and Russia, and we seem to have very few genuine members from those countries (we do give them a chance to show they're joining for genuine reasons, but so often we're let down).

Different forums will moderate differently. e.g. I know on Project Meditation, that certain moderators had moderating abilities only on certain forums and what they could do was limited. On the forum I moderate on, we've got a lot more ability to moderate across the whole forums and check out the members details, but that's because the Admin has got to know us and trusts us not to let personal biases/opinions get in the way.

Hugs
Giles

[Mr Monkey]

I see, that makes things a little clearer. From the amount of emails/ips on that stopforumspam.com website its quite a big problem. Spamming etc is an interesting topic (well to me anyway ), as initially you'd think it'd be fairly straight forward to track the offenders down but the deeper you look the more murky/complex/clever you realise the techniques used in this type of thing are (botnets and credential hijacking etc in the automated forms of spamming).

I can understand the benefit (but find it irritating) when people plug a product on a forum, but when people just post rubbish (like there email equivalent) I'm baffled at the benefit, but perhaps its "fun" for some people.....

Well thanks for that Giles, you've helped shine a bit of light on a topic I am not that familiar with and also quenched my curiosity .