A surge in spam registration?

[Robert]

I've noticed an increase in spam registration lately even though I use image verification and I wonder how can this be. Can a spam bot get past the image verification now? I've managed to ban all these before they can respond to the activation email. I know it's a spam registration because the user names are unique, so I google the name and get thousands of hits on other forums. I check out a few and they all registered on the same day and have the same email, home url, or other similarities. I googled one name and found no hits, but the next day it had over 15,000 hits. This must be automated, and yet it's getting by my the image verification. How can it be? Has anyone else noticed this?

--Robert

 

[Alex Apple]

Yup - http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25961 is what I posted yesterday.

School holidays?

 

[JamesVorobej8314]

well i am a moderator on a site that has a ton of spam, but when they are banned they keep coming back.

 

[mjk3k]

i have seen a influx in spam ... Kill all spammers i say

 

[shellspeare]

Me too. I keep banning the email addys but more keep popping up offering the same spam.

I don't think these are bots as after i banned a few address' they found a forum open for guest posting.

Perhaps a spam firm offering cash for backlinks?

 

[Longrider]

The sign ups I've been getting have increased in the past few weeks - several per day now. They get trapped by the email verification, so get no further. I suppose sooner or later they will find a workaround for this...

 

[Dragonlair]

Two of us admins on my board got on one at the same time the other day. I paged her (she couldn't respond) with a warning while the other one deleted the post.

She came back about 6 hours later figuring she was safe and tried again. The third admin happened to be on and deleted that one and banned her. She must have figured I wouldn't be on that late since I had gotten her earlier.

She had to post with the page I had sent staring her in the face because she never officially read it.

I say "she" because at least 99% of the members of our board are women. We welcome men but they don't seem to stay long (our board is for cross-stitchers).

The advantages of a larger staff - we spread the load!

 

[ronoxQ]

According to SpamBob, this is the person responsible... http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/Visual-Basic-Windows/craigslist-autoposter.html

 

[SpilltheBeans]

The best way to deal with spam bots is to add something unique to your forum registration. For example, add an extra required question in the registration page. A lot of spam bots are generic scripts and few if any will bother writing a special script just to bypass your forum.

 

[hari]

There has been a deluge of spam of late on my forum as well. It comes in cycles, so I'm not surprised. I'll die down after a while and resurface in a different form.

I wish there was some automagic spam killer like Spam Karma 2 for WordPress in vB and other forum software.

 

[mjk3k]

I wish there was some automagic spam killer like Spam Karma 2 for WordPress in vB and other forum software.

you may have just thought up the best VB mod ever ... i would cerntly pay for that mod ...

 

[City67]

Ahhhhh...this perfectly explains some odd registrations we have had lately. We DO have a couple extra questions I added to registration that they dont answer. This makes sense. Whats odd though is the questions are required, yet they dont answer them and still get a registration email sent.

 

[Velvet]

We've had quite a few on our board lately and up until now it's never been a problem. We don't use the image verification but we do use an activation email.

We just move the threads/posts and ban the user. There are enough of us that we catch most spam almost as soon as it's posted.

 

[hari]

you may have just thought up the best VB mod ever ... i would cerntly pay for that mod ...

It's the cumulative score assigned to spam that I really like based on certain elements of the post. With SK2 in WP, I've cut down nearly every kind of spam out there. The odd one does slip through, but that's to be expected when a human spammer uses more subtle methods. But of course, we expect moderators to deal with such stuff anyway.

 

[IFC]

I've been getting alot from @gawab.com . Weird crap so I put it on the list.

 

[mjp]

I've been getting alot from @gawab.com . Weird crap so I put it on the list.

gawab.com, cashette.com...

I had to switch to new user moderation, and it's a pain, but it has dropped the spam posts down to zero.

 

[Elyrose]

Hello folks

I found this thread whilst searching the net about spammers, due to a huge increase in spam registrations during the last week or two. We've had to ban gawab.com and also banned cashette.com.

We've had lots of phentermine related ones as well.

What has been noticed is that a lot of the spammers that join have similar details set in their profiles. They have the same word in their signature as in their interests or occupation (can't remember which way round it is) but there is a definite style.

I don't like banning domains but there are times when it has to be done.

Perhaps we should all get a list together of the domains where the spam is coming from.

Elyrose

 

[Brian Turner]

A few email domains to ban here:
http://www.securitywatch.co.uk/forum-spam/more-spam-emails-183.html

 

[Elyrose]

Thanks Brian, I've added them into my ban list

 

[Velvet]

Thanks Brian. Checking our database now...