Sunday 12/14 Spam Attack

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Sunday 12/14 Spam Attack

Postby Alice » Sun Dec 14, 2014 11:24 am

We appear to be under a sustained attack by spammers. I am deleting them in batches as they accumulate. I apologize for the thread clutter, as well as for the PM spam. There is also no need to report spam threads in the spam reporting thread; I see them.

One of the spammers posted a "normal" test post to the Off-Topic board in response to my sticky post about not making Off-Topic your first post. This shows we have a human being who can read and react who is hitting the board, and that this isn't just an automated bot that found us and is spidering us for a while.

I have reached out to TheoW, and presumably he will be contemplating what we can do to harden the board against further incidents.
Alice
 

Re: Sunday 12/14 Spam Attack

Postby TheoW » Sun Dec 14, 2014 12:17 pm

For the time being we're preventing new user accounts, but that shouldn't last to long. I've also removed all the questionable accounts created today so if I got real account by accident I'm sorry.

In the future it looks like new users will be locked down a bit harder then they currently are (which was not at all), but the details of that are still being worked out. More then likely requiring moderator approval of the first few posts as well as limited PM access and some forums. Hopefully we can get things back up to 100% ASAP.
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Re: Sunday 12/14 Spam Attack

Postby summertime » Mon Dec 15, 2014 3:32 am

TheoW wrote:For the time being we're preventing new user accounts, but that shouldn't last to long. I've also removed all the questionable accounts created today so if I got real account by accident I'm sorry.

In the future it looks like new users will be locked down a bit harder then they currently are (which was not at all), but the details of that are still being worked out. More then likely requiring moderator approval of the first few posts as well as limited PM access and some forums. Hopefully we can get things back up to 100% ASAP.


I had all messages and posts moderated on one of my Yahoo groups, Yahoo appears to be particularly susceptible to spammers but I haven't had any for several months now, which means I'll be inundated next week lol :o
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Re: Sunday 12/14 Spam Attack

Postby RoseLane » Mon Dec 15, 2014 3:31 pm

I hate spam
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Re: Sunday 12/14 Spam Attack

Postby Alice » Mon Dec 15, 2014 6:30 pm

At this point, you guys aren't seeing any of the spam, but it is continuing -- it's just being moderated and banned. Hopefully we'll get something a little heavier duty into the infrastructure soon.
Alice
 

Re: Sunday 12/14 Spam Attack

Postby kylekatarn77 » Wed Feb 04, 2015 4:14 pm

Thanks for the hard work!
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Sunday 12/14 Spam Attack

Postby Jeremyor » Wed Mar 04, 2015 3:44 pm

Huge spam attack this morning on CAF approx 6:20-6:40 am EDST. 17 out of 20 of the "new posts" menubar on the left hand side of webpage were spam posts. Did my best to report them, but it is frustrating indeed. Just fyi.
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