I share your hatred, D1, as I spend far too much time deleting them from the Oolite forum. They tend to come in waves, and there has been an increase lately - and that @mail.ru is quite common. It's an endless process, I'm afraid - been at it as an Admin for five years now, and I must have deleted/banned many thousands in that time. Ain't the internet wonderful - cats, porn, and spam!

Hm, i wonder why it ended up like this.
We were known for hackers and copyright ignorance, but a mass of spam is something new to me.

For some context, mail.ru is more or less synonymous to e-mail here, and is about as popular as gmail is in the english world, so it's choice for spammers is not surprising.

Was the spam in English?

Some of the spam posts were in english and some in russian. Some were actually quite funny actually.

When I went through the members there was actually over 100 members with @mail.ru for their email so I filtered out those who had legit posts and avatars and I removed the rest and banned the @mail.ru for an email address for new users. Existing users with it will be fine, I may remove it in a few months if I get emails from people asking.

I don't mind the occasional post and usually my security questions keep out the average bot since you actually have to know scifi to past the questions.

I didn't know Oolite forums got hit like that Cody (Sorry), I have looked into implementing white/black lists on the site but it slowed registration because it would look up IP/email addresses against a list with millions of spammers/bots. So yeah its a never ending battle, but for the most part SSC stays spam free and generally confrontation free. We don't have a lot of drama here just people caring about games 🙂

Thanks for the context Artlav, I figured I was blocking a large portion of possible russian members from joining with my move and I regret that. If Pinback or I were not on top of things, I couldn't imagine what us waiting 1-2 wks would be like to clean up spam...? It's amazing what I have see spam do to good communities where the admins don't stop it and clean it up quickly. I used to warn users now they get instantly banned and deleted.

Due to porn posters, we brought in first-post approval a few years back - it keeps any spammers off the actual forum, but they've still gotta be disposed of. The Oolite forum uses very basic phpBB stuff, so no trick questions there - only a basic captcha thingy.

I dunno! I delete one from the Oolite forum, and it turns up here too - Dustin*** (its suffix varies).

Odd one that one, no links.

<nods> Its message was identical to the one it posted on the Oolite forum - and its email/IP has form.

Darn spammers! Here is a handy site I used to use in my mod days. Helps track the little buggers activity and their lists are constantly updated by mods from many forums out there.

The Xmas wave of spammers is well under way - just spent thirty minutes killing a bunch of 'em over at Oolite!

@Geraldine: sign of the times - SFS now check browsers with anti-DDoS software before you can search.

Oodles of the bastards today! You might want to consider first-post approval, D1.

I feel so sorry for D1 & Pinback, it's an ugly thing when your forum comes under attack by this scum.

Aye... but at least it wasn't hacked, as once happened to the Oolite forum.

I am working on the new site, its slow going converting all of the articles (manually) and doing testing of the forum conversion (which for the most part is decent, not 100%.... they never are). But the important thing is that the content of the postings seem intact and nothing bad. It just seems a lot of posts with BBCode from IPBoard seems to not convert well. So there will be some older posts that may look messy and I will try to clean them up as I go.

I wanted to try to mass fix issues with quote BBCode with some database editing, but we'll see. I already some issues with some annoying things that I see that I may edit the database for. Only real issues with the conversion is that users may loose their avatars if I cannot figure out how to migrate them and I think users have to recreate passwords upon first login (but I need to confirm this).

I will try to install some anti-bot measures on the forums and wordpress to stop this assualt that we have been taking recently. Why people choose to do this to a free site is beyond me.

I might invite some veterans of the site to poke around my manual conversion of the site to give some feedback and if they notice anything that is messed up because I cannot find everything 🙂

I will more than likely bring SSC down the week of Thanksgiving since I am taking that week off and I will do the conversion at that time and get it all running. I think I would only need a day. But my provider has to update my VPS to latest version of Apache,SQL and PHP.

-D1-

D, dont worry about the loss of Avatars and whatnot. The safety of the forum must come first. As for any other glitches that pop up because you changed things, they too can be fixed over time. I just wish these damn spammers would bugger off!

They're back again!

And in full force!!!

It the same Chinese one, which has been at it since the weekend and it will probably sign up again tonight and their will be another load of spam in the morning.

Ban its IP (and any associated IPs)?

Looks like D1 may have to do it, same as the Ruskie one.

Porn pedlars - kill them! Nuke them from orbit - it's the only way to be sure!

Hi Everyone. Just a heads up just in case you see people complaining that they cannot use the site. Since people have been wanting to spam SSC I have decided to make registration go through a approval process in which that process will go through me.

And I will admit I will not check this everyday, so if you are a LEGIT PERSON and you want access to SSC please email me (admin at spacesimcentral dot com). But this should stop the majority of the spam since I have to personally approve users. Sorry it has come to this, and yet another reason i need to upgrade the site 🙂

When the newer version of the site is online trust me spam will be a #1 priority at squashing and I will put in whatever permissions or filters I need too to make that happen. I HATE THEM, and I usually like everyone but spammers really serve no purpose at all on the station so lets just blow them out the air lock

<nods> When they start flooding a forum, you have little choice.

Fully support you on this D.

Thanks everyone.

Also as of this morning if you are a member that has registered in the last 3 months (when spam started) and you have not posted and your account doesn't look like a legit person I will remove you. As Pinback has noticed is that we have had accounts signup and not be used for a few weeks and then start spamming. So I will take care of these this morning.

So if you are impacted by this change, please re-register and let me know by emailing me.