We have been getting silently attacked by spamming bots for about a year now, ever since I put 'Son of Xweb' online, these bots have been hammering away at our registration page, members list, user profile pages etc, this is to be expected since there are myriad vb forum spamming bot programs out there, but very early on I implemented a number of "countermeasures" to prevent these bots ever getting through the door or being able to access these things...
But now, it seems, there are a few spammers out there who are taking it to the next level... I have had to perma-ban 2 new user accounts in the past 48 hours that were created by forum spammers... so, it seems, someone out there has an actual human doing the signup procedure to create spammer accounts here... Mark, Eric, Gregory, when I retire at the end of April, you guys are going to have to keep a sharp eye on new user registrations to preemptively ban these idiots when they sign up...
So far, the trend is, they're entering "123456" in the "about my X1/9s" field of registration... if you see that, don't even bother waiting for them to make a first post, just permaban em. I am going to have to figure out some new custom preventive measures to add to the signup process, that can even screw up a human spammer, but as well, we're just going to have to shoot em down as they show up.
In the future I'd prefer to set up a means by which we can just delete them completely from the db, but for now, its important that we put their accounts in permanent ban status as opposed to just deleting them. Permaban will take all their signup info (emails, ip addys etc) and prevent those from future signups, whereas deleting the account would allow them to sign right back up again with same credentials.. it hardly makes a difference since they use ip scramblers/forgers and have hacked gmail so the likelihood of dupe info on signup is remote anyway, but ...
But now, it seems, there are a few spammers out there who are taking it to the next level... I have had to perma-ban 2 new user accounts in the past 48 hours that were created by forum spammers... so, it seems, someone out there has an actual human doing the signup procedure to create spammer accounts here... Mark, Eric, Gregory, when I retire at the end of April, you guys are going to have to keep a sharp eye on new user registrations to preemptively ban these idiots when they sign up...
So far, the trend is, they're entering "123456" in the "about my X1/9s" field of registration... if you see that, don't even bother waiting for them to make a first post, just permaban em. I am going to have to figure out some new custom preventive measures to add to the signup process, that can even screw up a human spammer, but as well, we're just going to have to shoot em down as they show up.
In the future I'd prefer to set up a means by which we can just delete them completely from the db, but for now, its important that we put their accounts in permanent ban status as opposed to just deleting them. Permaban will take all their signup info (emails, ip addys etc) and prevent those from future signups, whereas deleting the account would allow them to sign right back up again with same credentials.. it hardly makes a difference since they use ip scramblers/forgers and have hacked gmail so the likelihood of dupe info on signup is remote anyway, but ...