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STOP SPAMMING THE BOARD

Start blocking IPs on teh webserver... use mod_rewrite in apache to return 403 if it matches their IP.  Do that and they'll usually back off.

That's been my experience in the past... dealt with a barrage of spam on another forum a few years ago and stopping the webserver from giving anything more than a 403 kept things at bay.

 

 

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Message 21 of 28
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@crossrulz wrote:

for(imstuck) wrote:
Every time I see it, all I can think is "What's the point?"

I have the same thought.  Spamming came about as an advertisement ploy.  Now they are more annoying than telemarketers.  But at this level, I think it is purely malicious in nature.  No real point except to hurt and/or annoy people.


 

You're forgetting about search engine optimization. One of Google's key criteria for ranking pages is how many pages link to it, so putting a link to your site as many places as possible improves your changes of showing up as a highly-positioned search result.
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Message 22 of 28
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I've always though that fighting fire with fire was the way to go.  Could good hackers write bots that swamped the spammers with thousands of fake orders for their product?  Imagine the frustration of thinking you hit it big and then finding out that none of the credit card numbers were valid!  Smiley Very Happy ... Smiley Frustrated ... Smiley Sad  

LabVIEW Pro Dev & Measurement Studio Pro (VS Pro) 2019 - Unfortunately now moving back to C#, .NET, Python due to forced change to subscription model by NI. 8^{
Message 23 of 28
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@rolfk wrote:

@Ravens Fan wrote:

It was about 200 pages of spam by the time it ended.


Last time I checked it was actually about 330 pages of 30 messages each, with most of the pages probably not containing one legit post. It seemed like the bot was hitting the board with about half a dozen accounts with more than one message per minute per account. Strangely I only found one spam post in the non LabVIEW boards I checked.



I think you're right.  I was occasionally checking the page count, and I think I was actually around page 280+ the last time I checked, so I should have said about 300 pages, not 200 pages.  Plus seeing the current "new" message count for me (when it really should be called "unread" messages) at 349,000, but I know it was around 358-359 thousand this morning, that means around 9000 "new" messages, or at least 300+ pages.

 

Historically, spam hadn't been a huge problem on these boards.  But this weekend, for about a day and a half, it effectively took out the LabVIEW forum .  If not from a technical standpoint, it completely made the forum unusable from a user standpoint.

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Message 24 of 28
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Most likely you know this already, but: unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, you can't just substitute any random set of digits as a credit card number.  Credit card numbers are internally consistent and contain checksums, so it's pretty trivial to do at least brief validation, and I suspect spammers already do so.

Of course you can write code that generates valid credit card numbers but now you're talking about a lot of processing time for a dubious result.  Somehow I suspect that no spammer is going to be so crestfallen that they stop spamming.

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Message 25 of 28
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Ravens Fan wrote:

 

Historically, spam hadn't been a huge problem on these boards.  But this weekend, for about a day and a half, it effectively took out the LabVIEW forum .  If not from a technical standpoint, it completely made the forum unusable from a user standpoint.



Not sure if this is more of a problem or less of a problem seeing as it happen on the weekend! Because it was the weekend the forum was unmoderated so the problem wasn't dealt with as quickly as it might otherwise have been, but at least fewer people were posting questions (except maybe Sunday night which was Monday morning on the other half of the globe). I think we all agree though, it was a problem either way!

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Message 26 of 28
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I for one thank the spammers.  Not only did I score some great deals on some much needed Lithium, but with my wife and two out of three kids out of town I had a fun, uninterupted afternoon with the oft-neglected middle child.

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Message 27 of 28
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nathand wrote: 
Somehow I suspect that no spammer is going to be so crestfallen that they stop spamming.

Wouldn't it be great if it were that easy though?  You're right, of course.  As long as it's so easy to blanket the world with their crap and even a tiny percent of the population are foolish enough to respond, there will be SPAM.  And EGGS, and EGGS and SPAM...  Wait, this isn't the Python forum is it??? Smiley Embarassed

LabVIEW Pro Dev & Measurement Studio Pro (VS Pro) 2019 - Unfortunately now moving back to C#, .NET, Python due to forced change to subscription model by NI. 8^{
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Message 28 of 28
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