Rick Ethridge
Veteran Member
User Ashleyphones.
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Spammer Alert
- Thread starter Rick Ethridge
- Start date
Yep. Taken care of.
Sorry I was a bit slow!
E
Sorry I was a bit slow!
E
carlsson
Veteran Member
On the topic of fake/spam users, is it possible and/or adviceable to protect the user profiles behind login? The forum itself can be world readable, but in order to see someone's profile, I would suggest to require a login.
This is not due to privacy, but because since the end of November 2005, this forum has gained about 150 members, of which more than 50% are fake users. I don't know how many who even activated the account, and whether inactive members show up in the lists. In the homepage link, they put in a porn, gambling, drugs or other URL. It can be a matter of policy which kinds of websites users are supposed to link to, but in this case the primary reason is to get a referral link, so Google and other search engines will promote that particular page based on how many other sites link there.
The user profile page thus will be considered a referral page. Some sites have been credited with a handful or even more "users". If the profile (and member list) is not visible for guests, search engine spiders will fail to find the page, and the link is worthless since the search engine doesn't know it is there. People who put spam links in their signature and post a single nonsense message are already taken care of, I've noticed.
This is not due to privacy, but because since the end of November 2005, this forum has gained about 150 members, of which more than 50% are fake users. I don't know how many who even activated the account, and whether inactive members show up in the lists. In the homepage link, they put in a porn, gambling, drugs or other URL. It can be a matter of policy which kinds of websites users are supposed to link to, but in this case the primary reason is to get a referral link, so Google and other search engines will promote that particular page based on how many other sites link there.
The user profile page thus will be considered a referral page. Some sites have been credited with a handful or even more "users". If the profile (and member list) is not visible for guests, search engine spiders will fail to find the page, and the link is worthless since the search engine doesn't know it is there. People who put spam links in their signature and post a single nonsense message are already taken care of, I've noticed.
Terry Yager
Veteran Member
carlsson said:
Yeah, I manage to stay on top of those pretty well, but, as you've probably noticed, I'm not the best at detecting some of the more subtile forms of spam.
--T
carlsson
Veteran Member
In the case of bogus homepage links, it doesn't matter much for the appearance of the Vintage Computer Forum, other than if the site would be ranked based on which pages it links to - or one can reach rather - and one is never more than three clicks away from a porn site.
To a certain limit, I respect all those sites despite their content, but knowing how valuable link exchange is - sometimes it matters more how many sites are linked to you than what your content is - I'd take measures on my own website not to get flooded by freebie linkers. I've recently seen these people (I assume it is humans getting paid $0.01 for every link they can put up) flooding other forums I visit in the same fashion, so it definitely isn't unique for this one.
To a certain limit, I respect all those sites despite their content, but knowing how valuable link exchange is - sometimes it matters more how many sites are linked to you than what your content is - I'd take measures on my own website not to get flooded by freebie linkers. I've recently seen these people (I assume it is humans getting paid $0.01 for every link they can put up) flooding other forums I visit in the same fashion, so it definitely isn't unique for this one.
Terry Yager
Veteran Member
Well, sometimes ya never know just what you're linking to. I kicked-up this site earlier tonight, and figgered the page owner could be arrested for possession/diseminitation of kiddie-porn (check out the pix, bottom row, far left ("air-conditioned kids")) even though he (perfectly innocently) posted publicly-available advertising material from the early sixties, on a "classic car" website.
[link deleted due to paranoia]
--T
EDIT: OMG, I just realized that now, I too, may be arrested for distributing the same kiddie-porn...I'll prolly have to delete this post...<paranoia kicks in>...<deletes link>...
--T
[link deleted due to paranoia]
--T
EDIT: OMG, I just realized that now, I too, may be arrested for distributing the same kiddie-porn...I'll prolly have to delete this post...<paranoia kicks in>...<deletes link>...
--T
Unless I'm missing something or unless I want to mod the board I'm pretty sure I have to switch software packages in order to make the profiles members only. . .
That'll take some doing, but it's on my list!
Erik
That'll take some doing, but it's on my list!
Erik
carlsson
Veteran Member
In the mean time, I notice an unregistered guest has been active posting about casinos on several phpBB's I visit over night.
CP/M User
Veteran Member
"carlsson" wrote:
-> In the mean time, I notice an unregistered guest has been active
-> posting about casinos on several phpBB's I visit over night.
On that subject matter - does anyone know what that garbadge is for the
subject? - I've seen a lot of that (especally with spam e-mails).
Can't they write or something - or are out of their mind (on some funny
wack or something)? I thought it might of been some scrubbley foreign
language (no offence) - which the computer can't interpret back to English.
CP/M User.
-> In the mean time, I notice an unregistered guest has been active
-> posting about casinos on several phpBB's I visit over night.
On that subject matter - does anyone know what that garbadge is for the
subject? - I've seen a lot of that (especally with spam e-mails).
Can't they write or something - or are out of their mind (on some funny
wack or something)? I thought it might of been some scrubbley foreign
language (no offence) - which the computer can't interpret back to English.
CP/M User.
DimensionDude
Experienced Member
Erik,
Perhaps you should look into the module used by some other PHP based forums that has a random string of numbers and letters that the bots can't read (ex. passmark.com forums) during the initial signup. If the spammer has to manually intervene, maybe he just won't bother.
Kent
Perhaps you should look into the module used by some other PHP based forums that has a random string of numbers and letters that the bots can't read (ex. passmark.com forums) during the initial signup. If the spammer has to manually intervene, maybe he just won't bother.
Kent
DimensionDude said:
I may try something like that someday. I had a few mods on the boards early on but decided that since the frequent upgrades were such a pain I'd rather stay vanilla and save the hassle.
I'm still considering other board software which should alleviate this problem (and others) but it would require a new host and I haven't really gotten into that research yet!
E