Grrr I hate Spammers

[sscadmin]

Hello EveryoneAs everyone has probably seen the past 2-3wks we have been getting more spam posting. Thank you to all that have reported the bots/people when they appeared, Pinback and I try to squish them as soon as we can.So now to the reason for the post and this might be mainly for Russian users. I have banned all registrations to SSC from this day forward to any email address ending in @mail.ru all of the recent spammers all had this address in common. So i am sorry for the inconvenience this may cause you, but you will have to register with a different email address.I have always made it known that we have a zero tolerance rule to spam and people that disrupt the community so I removed all members that haven't posted or that didn't look like a legit user that had the registered email address ending in mail.ru.SSC isn't up and running for money purposes, it is hear for the fans of space and scifi games. And if I have to block an entire country IP range I would if they disrupt SSC's user base. I look at everyone here as a friend and welcome all. So if you come here to ruin peoples fun I will be here to stop you :)Thanks everyone for your understanding and the vigilance in guarding the station from intruders. Its good to know there are honorable mercenaries among us.-D1-

[Cody]

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!

[Artlav]

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?

[sscadmin]

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.

[Cody]

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.

[Cody]

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

[Pinback]

Odd one that one, no links.

[Cody]

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

[Geraldine]

Darn spammers! Here[/url] 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.

[Cody]

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.

[Cody]

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

[Geraldine]

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

[Cody]

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

[sscadmin]

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-

[Geraldine]

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! :girlmad:

[Cody]

They're back again!

[CaptainKal]

And in full force!!! :suicide:

[Pinback]

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.

[Cody]

Ban its IP (and any associated IPs)?

[Pinback]

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