Suggestion on how to ward off spambots

[TheFlyingSquirrel]

With all this "nokia 4 juss $20!" crap appearing day after day, a few of the mods are probably getting a little pissed off. I have come up with a possible way to stop it.

How about adding a new "swear filter" that works like this?

When a user has fewer than 10 posts, he/she/it is prohibited from making posts with the following words appearing more than 5 times:

1. Nokia
2. Qtek
3. Nextel
4. iPod
5. Apple
6. "Xbox 360"
7. Playstation

OTHER POSSIBILITIES

Also prohibited would be the starting of any new thread with the exact phrase "Brand New" or "For Just" in the title.

Another possibility would be prohibiting a new user (i.e. less than 10 posts) from putting in more than ten $ signs.

This "swear filter" would obviously need refining, but I think it's a pretty good idea otherwise.

Also, if a newbie needed to make a post with the above content in it, then he/she could PM an admin and provide a summary of the post that would be made, or he/she could simply make 10 posts.

Anyone have comments on my idea?

[dougk_ff7]

Hrm, I think this is the wrong approach, though it's not a bad idea, necessarily. Really, what you're talking about almost sounds like implementing SpamAssassin for forums, which is rather complicated (those weights are incredibly sensitive, too--changing the values can throw all sorts of stuff out of whack).

I'd be more interested to look at the spam IPs, see how they're posting--are they open proxies? What? Open proxies or similar means should be trivial enough to ban... sure, you won't be able to get rid of everything, and it's still pretty complicated, but who knows.

I could be wrong, since I'm not terribly active on the forums, but the level of work it takes to eliminate said posts is rather small compared to the amount of work it takes to hack something up to "outsmart" the spammers -- and if you do, how long will it last?

[TheFlyingSquirrel]

Originally Posted by dougk_ff7

I'd be more interested to look at the spam IPs, see how they're posting--are they open proxies? What? Open proxies or similar means should be trivial enough to ban... sure, you won't be able to get rid of everything, and it's still pretty complicated, but who knows.

I actually asked Panda about this. He said that the bots all showed different IP addresses. I don't know if that's what you're talking about, though.

Originally Posted by dougk_ff7

I could be wrong, since I'm not terribly active on the forums, but the level of work it takes to eliminate said posts is rather small compared to the amount of work it takes to hack something up to "outsmart" the spammers -- and if you do, how long will it last?

Since the spambots are all posting stupid "FOR SELL" crap, a filter of not allowing a post with over 20 $ signs to go through SHOULD last a while, and if not then no one else's posts would be affected anyway.

[Cybeast Gregar]

I think that thats a good idea , but why would people put stupid ''buy this for only....''''and new that for just.....''posts ?If you ask me the whole spam idea is stupisd but what ur doing to help is fantastic.props 4 u!

[TheFlyingSquirrel]

BUMP.

In the most recent incarnation of this spambot, "USD" appeared a lot, and I noticed plenty of names that could have been filtered.

How difficult would it be to implement?

[Keith]

Alright I'm trying out a few things. The first thing I did was I added a new question when you register. It cycles through a few questions but they are very easy to answer. If it's a bot, they obviously couldn't answer the question and they won't be allowed to register.

I also added a mod that will block posts if certain words are found, just like you suggested. It will only effect users with less then 10 posts.

So with these 2 things I think it would be pretty hard for us to get anymore spam.

[TheFlyingSquirrel]

There were some people I've heard saying that it's REAL PEOPLE registering and then inserting a bot into the accounts, so that first measure might not work, but the second measure...

What did you filter out?

[phuzion]

Originally Posted by TheFlyingSquirrel

There were some people I've heard saying that it's REAL PEOPLE registering and then inserting a bot into the accounts, so that first measure might not work, but the second measure...

What did you filter out?

I know what words he's filtered out, but just for the sake of preventing spam, I'm not going to post what they are. "Oh hey guys look, Phuzion said that XXX YYY and ZZZ are filtered, let's modify our spamming technique so as not to include these words"

And I'm just about 100% sure that it's people manually registering then sticking bots on accounts. Hey, look at it this way, at least we know that whoever registers from now on is somewhat intelligent. All of my friends know what 8-6 is. Hell, everyone knows it's 3.