Anon posting gone bad

Orion · 03-09-2012 10:32PM #1

Recently the amount of anon-posted spam is getting ridiculous. It's mainly on the Pregnancy thread in Pregnant although occasionally on other mega-threads too. If an admin/cmod/dev has a look at the last few pages on that thread they'll see what I mean.

Have spammers gotten around the captchas being used on boards? If so, is there an updated/improved version that still allows anon posting relatively easily while keeping out these spammers?

Boards.ie: Danny · 03-09-2012 10:43PM

reCAPTCHA has been broken for a while now. It wasn't keeping out spam registrations so we swapped it out for our own brand of human verification when we moved it over to our new authentication system.

Applying the same changes to the anon-posting system without moving over to the new UI (which we're not ready to do) involves quite a bit of work. That thread seems to have been targeted by a few spambots though, so I'll look at blocking their IP ranges when I get into the office tomorrow

Danny

Orion · 04-09-2012 07:45AM

Cool thanks Danny.

Orion · 04-09-2012 07:47AM

fyi it's not just that thread - although it's the worst. The main Parenting forum gets a lot of crap too. Of the twenty visible (to mods) threads on the main forum 7 are spam. If they're the same bots then happy days, it not can they be blocked too.

Boards.ie: Danny · 04-09-2012 07:55AM

Orion wrote: »

fyi it's not just that thread - although it's the worst. The main Parenting forum gets a lot of crap too. Of the twenty visible (to mods) threads on the main forum 7 are spam. If they're the same bots then happy days, it not can they be blocked too.

I'll review those too then. I'm nowhere near convinced it'll stem the tide long term, but it might reduce workload in the short term.

Danny

Edit: So I just cleared this with Dav, we're going to kill anonymous posting from non-irish IP addresses. That'll sort those spammers right out

Orion · 04-09-2012 10:01AM

Is that not a bit of an elephant gun? For example if I want to post anon while in work I'm on either a UK or US IP address depending on which proxy I go through. I'd hate to prevent anon posting for people who need it but do want the spammers stopped - it's a balancing act I know. Could non-EU ones be blocked maybe?

Taltos · 04-09-2012 10:06AM

FYI - PI is also seeing a slight increase in these as is Separation and Divorce - nothing over the top, more of a trickle.

Thanks.

Boards.ie: Danny · 04-09-2012 10:34AM

Orion wrote: »

Is that not a bit of an elephant gun? For example if I want to post anon while in work I'm on either a UK or US IP address depending on which proxy I go through. I'd hate to prevent anon posting for people who need it but do want the spammers stopped - it's a balancing act I know. Could non-EU ones be blocked maybe?

It works remarkably well, I was up on 20 ranges to ban this morning before I read half of your recent spam threads/posts. It's futile to tackle it this way.You were hit from Sweden and the US a few times on VPN ranges. And the EU includes places like Latvia & Lithuania - known spam havens.

I can allow the UK too, which will allow some degree of flexibility for anonymiser proxies.

Edit:

The plan now is to enable anon posting for Ireland and the UK and to disable it for all other countries. Any time somebody from outside those two countries tries to post we'll monitor where they're trying to post from and look at the stats next month to see if we missed anything that probably isn't spam

Orion · 04-09-2012 02:46PM

Sounds like a plan. Thanks a lot Danny

Boards.ie: Danny · 04-09-2012 04:48PM

This'll happen tomorrow with a bit of luck, definitely not one we want to deploy and head off home for the evening on

Victor · 04-09-2012 04:53PM

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

This'll happen tomorrow with a bit of luck, definitely not one we want to deploy and head off home for the evening on

But think of the fun as all those servers crash in Taiwan / somewhere pretending to be Taiwan!

Moonbeam · 04-09-2012 05:51PM

Thanks Guys.

Dam no modding on foreign holidays.;)

Maple · 04-09-2012 06:10PM

Spam in TLL has gone through the roof too. Would appreciate if you'd take a look at it and kill them all. Cheers.

OldGoat · 05-09-2012 08:21AM

Also in the Creative Writing forum in the Arts cat.

Boards.ie: Danny · 05-09-2012 03:15PM

As of ten minutes ago anonymous posting for non-Ireland/UK ip addresses was disabled. Already I've seen Lithuania and China try to make some posts

Could you guys keep an eye on your forums and spam levels and report any abnormalities to us.

Thanks

Orion · 06-09-2012 10:30AM

Will do - thanks Danny.

Big Bag of Chips · 06-09-2012 10:14PM

I got a pm today from a poster who has posted a thread unreged in PI. She was coming back to reply to it today and got the message that due to spam she could not post.. she's in Japan. (post is about whether to come home or not)

I suggested that she pm me her reply, and I could post it for her, and in the meantime I would check what the procedure would be from here on in?

Is that ok?

Boards.ie: Paddy · 07-09-2012 09:30AM

That's completely fine, we'll have to leave things as they are for the moment so we can get a good baseline. We may look at allowing some more countries that aren't spam havens over time but we need to see how effective the current set up is first.

Anon posting gone bad

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