Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Chatting => Chatting on the Plot => Topic started by: John on January 03, 2019, 12:00
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We're getting about 4 attempts an hour to register as members from spammers so all new members have to be admin approved. It's a bit of a pain in the fundament to be honest but the only way we can cope at the moment.
It's quite sophisticated, obviously script driven but the user names, emails and IP addresses all differ. There's a sort of pattern to the user names though so fairly easy to pick out. Most are caught be our stop spam software but the ones left need to be checked before approval.
Hopefully they'll get fed up and go away eventually.
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Oh heck! That's the last thing you need at the beginning of a new year. I have no experience or knowledge about them so what are they attempting to gain by doing it on this site?
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John, what a bind for you to deal with this. I, like Goosegirl, just don't understand it either. Hope they soon buzz off. regards, Mrs Bouquet
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They do it to make money, Mrs B.
We have systems to stop them, but sophisticated spam bots can get round some of them.
We've been targeted about 60 times so far today but none have got all the way through our defences.
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This site is not the only one where the spammers are out and about. It's almost like a new year's resolution on a small blog I run. Haven't seen so many in the last 3.5 years.
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Elder daught (the one in IT), told me that as the new privacy laws are beginning to bite, we should find a slowdown soon - I definitely have noticed fewer spam emails, but quite like the idea of a trip to Russia with Svetlana, then on to Nigeria via the US to get my $34,000,000...
Should I tell Mrs G, or can you keep this - er- quiet?
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I find that they are often within a group of IP address that you can block, maybe not in this case.
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I find that they are often within a group of IP address that you can block, maybe not in this case.
Sometimes they repeat IP but they appear to have an awful lot and I don't want to block genuine visitors, obviously.
Even with 'stop forum spam' installed 2 or 3 a day were getting on and peppering the forum with their manure so over Christmas I blocked all new registrations to have a breather whilst I looked into solutions. Hopefully the current script will stop and report no success so they'll give up.
PIGS!!
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My experience with banning by IP is problematic as, for instance, Sky broadband users 'share' IPs so an IP ban can potentially take out a few innocents. Ideally you ban by machine ID, but if the bots are using a VPN network with masking thats not possible.