It’s time to do something - anything.  We’re now a soft target and this will get worse.  I’d be happy to volunteer to help if human intervention is required - approving new users or whatever.

Doing my best from US ET zone. 1am right before bed I whacked one just getting started. And about 8am whacked 3 or 4. Some coverage for off US hours would help.

The problem here is that it isn't enough to hand out rights to kill posts, because the spammers sends in new posts with just a couple of seconds/post. So LT needs to hand out the access right to block or kill the offending accounts.

 

And this requires trust in the people LT hands out such rights to, since 10 minutes with such rights to the wrong person can introduce damages that takes days or weeks to recover from.

 

Maybe LT could check into a moderator-lite access right, where the junior moderators only has a right to go hunt posts/posters from accounts less than 24 hours old. Such junior moderator rights would be reasonably safe to hand out to additional people.

As it is, the current moderators has to work overtime to keep the site usable. And it still isn't enough.

Whilst I agree with your assessment @pwm I don't think there's a shortage of trustworthy candidates around.   Such is the spirit of this forum.

10 minutes ago, CHBMB said:

Whilst I agree with your assessment @pwm I don't think there's a shortage of trustworthy candidates around.   Such is the spirit of this forum.

I think there are multiple good candidates too. It's just that it is always a scary step for a forum owner to hand out more heavy-duty keys - especially when a large percent of the income depends on this forum working well.

Isn't it possible to run some kind of SQL every 10 minutes or so that will purge / move aside for admin check any message with suspicious characteristics?

We can identify the spam by it's long subject, phone numbers, keywords ("love"...) etc. So can SQL statement.

3 minutes ago, pwm said:

especially when a large percent of the income depends on this forum working well.

Which right now, it isn't working well. The longer this goes on, the more long term damage is being done. Good people are getting tired of dealing with it, and walking away instead of trying to keep actively helping others in these conditions. It's frustrating to everybody.

3 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Which right now, it isn't working well. The longer this goes on, the more long term damage is being done. Good people are getting tired of dealing with it, and walking away instead of trying to keep actively helping others in these conditions. It's frustrating to everybody.

 

Yes - earlier today I had to go to the 12th page of the general forum to find the oldest unread post. So if it's frustrating for people who want to help, it must be 10 times more frustrating for the people who have an issue and gets their support thread buried behind several hundred spam mails.

 

I'd say the forum issues needs to be given priority purple - outside the range of a traditional green-to-red scale.

I'm getting spam via forum messaging - unacceptable!

Sent from my ASUS_Z00AD using Tapatalk

Apparently the "new measures" implemented by limetech yesterday announced by Tom are completely ineffective. Here we go again with another couple waves.

Apparently the "new measures" implemented by limetech yesterday announced by Tom are completely ineffective. Here we go again with another couple waves.

It's working, though a few still get through, it appears to ban the user after 2 to 4 posts, definitely much better than yesterday, I'd guess around 10 to 15 total spam posts today, yesterday there were more than 300.

 

 

I whacked 3 or 4 spammers at 7:30ET.

3 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

It's working, though a few still get through, it appears to ban the user after 2 to 4 posts, definitely much better than yesterday, I'd guess around 10 to 15 total spam posts today, yesterday there were more than 300.

 

 

 

The scary part is just that we don't know if the account creation is partly performed manually or fully automatically - i.e. if they will tire of spamming this site or if the spam robot algorithm will just adapt and create more accounts. But LT should be able to get some hint from the timing in the server logs.

Why is it that difficult to block the every day spamming? Pretty annoying to read every morning the news from India...

 

 

 

 

 

 

9 minutes ago, rl2664 said:

Why is it that difficult to block the every day spamming? Pretty annoying to read every morning the news from India...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because SPAM is a huge industry and the spammers are willing to invest a very large amount of time into good technical solutions to break through spam protection.

 

This means sites that uses a standard spam protection system will suffer, because the site owners can't invest as much time in spam protection than the spammers can invest in attack methods.

Best spam protection is spam protection that is unique for the site and that doesn't behave like any standard anti-spam system. It's only meaningful for the spammers to find site-specific workarounds for the really huge sites.

What if the admin/mods unlock new users manually until the problem is fixed? I read/write in a lot other forums, but I have never seen that much span coming through like here.

 

 

 

 

 

5 hours ago, rl2664 said:

What if the admin/mods unlock new users manually until the problem is fixed? I read/write in a lot other forums, but I have never seen that much span coming through like here.

 

 

 

 

 

If you have 10 identical forum sites, that doesn't mean all will get the same amount of spam. A couple of weeks ago, there was hardly any spam here.

 

It's just a question of getting the site flagged as a suitable target. Then the spam bots will return again and again.

 

It's quite similar to email spam - it's enough that your email address enters one spam list. Then that email address will always continue to be attacked by spam mails year-after-year. And the spammers will even sell your email address to other spammers.

 

All the spam isn't because this forum is more vulnerable than any other forum, or because administration and moderators are doing a worse job. It's just that the forum is tagged in a spam database.

Im not sure, but i think your forum is hacked.

 

I was posting a thread, after i edited it this happend: (ofc i did not upload anything)

 

 

Edited January 24, 20188 yr by nuhll

 

17 hours ago, nuhll said:

Im not sure, but i think your forum is hacked.

 

I was posting a thread, after i edited it this happend: (ofc i did not upload anything)

 

 

Or maybe your activity isn't secure and someone has possibly used your login...  It's at least as likely.

They hsould just find out where this picture came from. Or they could check if my profile was accessed from another ip.

Edited January 24, 20188 yr by nuhll

Note that there exists malware that can inject additional information into peoples forum posts on-the-fly. Which means that the forum logs will not contain any information about any additional accesses. That is a reason why especially browser plugins should be selected with the outmost care - lots of plugins grabs the rights to filter all web data, allowing them to read and/or modify web page content.

 

If you are the only one suffering this issue, then it's likely that the issue is somewhere on your side.

Im on, i dont know, 20 boards active and never had seen this. 

 

So i have a virus, which just injects here a picture, but not at other boards?

 

Im running kaspersky (which is the best av on the market) and i didnt  had a malware since, i dont know, 10 years!? I only use adblocker (ublock) and lastpass... in chrome.. all windows updates, windows 10... i dont think its on my part. But ofc, there could be a new virus which is espcially to infiltrate the limetech forum ...

Edited January 24, 20188 yr by nuhll

7 minutes ago, nuhll said:

But ofc, there could be a new virus which is espcially to infiltrate the limetech forum

That only shows ads to you?

 

If it were widespread, I assure you those of us active on the forums would have seen it, or seen others report it.

No, it was a picture upload on my post. something2.jpg

 

As i posted the edit, i saw the picture and went back and removed it.

 

Maybe it has something to do with the spamming here.

Edited January 24, 20188 yr by nuhll

So, some time passed. I did not got hacked, never found a virus. Nothing changed.

 

But the picture has the same whatsapp number as other spam on the internet or in other invision boards.

 

Also this forum had this spam already: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Flime-technology.com%2Fforums%2Ftopic%2F68403-dr-mahlangu-0768664508-abortion-clinic-in-benoni%2F%3Fdo%3DgetNewComment&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Flime-technology.com%2Fforums%2Ftopic%2F68403-dr-mahlangu-0768664508-abortion-clinic-in-benoni%2F%3Fdo%3DgetNewComment&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.746j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

 

https://www.google.de/search?safe=off&biw=1920&bih=949&ei=c1WyWqSvDMG0sAHX0LEY&q="%2B27796318403"+forum&oq="%2B27796318403"+forum&gs_l=psy-ab.3..35i39k1.2901.2901.0.3293.1.1.0.0.0.0.123.123.0j1.1.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..0.1.122....0.p0a1iydCUR0

 

I wonder if @limetech look into my findings...