Grimrock

how clever...NOT

I don't want to sound hostile to anyone, but.... Was that really REALLY smart spam? It was just an ad. On a spam thread, thus matching the content as usual. Am I misunderstanding this? Was our spam thread spammed?

Hi moderators,

Did you notice that the forums are currently taken over by spam?
Grab your swords and slay them!

And why did all that spam choose to suddenly attack this forum?!?!
That kinda scares me out...

uggardian

Oh wow. That was quite an avalanche. Hopefully I managed to clean all of it up but if you still see some, press the report-button

edit: I updated the spambot countermeasures but do note that there are probably still a handful of spambots that have already managed to register here on the forums but who have not yet posted. It's likely that there will be increased amounts of spam in the near future. I cleaned up new users who were obvious spambots but there were a lot of borderline cases left in there who I don't dare to ban outright. Just keep on reporting suspicious activity and we'll try to handle the rest, thanks!

I'm away for a day (pikkujoulut) and naturally something like that happens.. =)

I was moderator on a guitar player forum for several years. The robo-spam got quite bad (discovered there was software on a hacker web site that was designed to break into & post the forum software we were using). I started keeping a log of the IP addresses used by the hackers. Most were from Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Indonesia. Research using an IP address reverse-lookup generally had the traffic coming from specific sub-nets. I would block those sub-nets entirely after reviewing what IP addresses established users were using. Blocked users would get a message about sending an email to a forum moderator. Doing this cut back spam about 75%. Some of the more persistent spammers buy IP host time in the US (and I expect western Europe). It was usually the same three or 4 web hosting sites in California that seem to cater to that kind of traffic so I blocked them altogether. It was a lot work sometimes.

You are right, in that the spammers will create an account, or series of accounts, and then not use them for a while. reviewing the IP addresses of new accounts usually will detect these.

There were some examples where 2 or more spammer accounts would post and answer each other based on some key word, that may not make too much sense in the real world.

We had 1 legitimate user that travelled in Asia with a laptop that seemed to get caught by the above methodology once every few months, but in general it worked.

Well you probably saw, but another tidal wave of spam just hit. Sigh, I've said this before but I hate spam.

Edit: God, it grew bigger. This had better pass. Right, now it's intolerable.

I've just deleted 30+ spam posts to!

Daniel.

I gave up at some point on another forum. At least they were not visible to non-mods.

Still coming, no end in sight.