Jolt Country

Geez, I can't believe some lifeless chud(s) found it necessary to write software that'll post what's essentially spam to phpBB bulletin boards. Is it really necessary that every single aspect of the online experience be filled with shit like this? It's totally frustrating.

The part that gets me is that it could easily be avoided on the part of the phpbb team.

These stupid bots are essentially accessing posting.php. Because each BBS has the same name for it -- posting.php -- they can throw their list of bulletin boards into a script and fire them off from their proxies over and over again.

The quick solution would be to have everyone's posting.php be called something else. You call it 84a98d&64da27.php and then have an entry in the admin config panel to change it to something else once a day.

Let's say that the phpbb team doesn't implement that. They won't because they've never addressed the spam situation, not even once, and probably will never do so. So *I* go ahead and change posting.php to something else. That's fine and dandy, but now for ever subsequent upgrade I have to go and manually change all the files to the new name. And because the phpbb team doesn't upgrade unless it's a serious security upgrade you HAVE to immediately install each one of their upgrades and having to do something like make a label switch slows the process down.

I'm really unhappy with phpbb.

And yes... you would think that it would be nice if people could be adults and maybe we wouldn't have to have EVERY FRIGGING THING infected with these spam managers... but there won't be penalties for it! Backup your copy of 'Hatecreed and the Keening Weenies' in MP3 form and you're a criminal, but spam thousands of bulletin boards? Why should the government step in there? Huh!!?!?!?!

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:And yes... you would think that it would be nice if people could be adults and maybe we wouldn't have to have EVERY FRIGGING THING infected with these spam managers... but there won't be penalties for it! Backup your copy of 'Hatecreed and the Keening Weenies' in MP3 form and you're a criminal, but spam thousands of bulletin boards? Why should the government step in there? Huh!!?!?!?!

I'm so sick and tired of dealing with spam and hack attempts and all that crap. I spend all friggin' day at work tweaking spam filters on our mail server, or dealing with infected Windows machines, or hacked Unix machines, or whatnot. When the amount of time you spend trying to keep systems secure is greater than the time you spend actually using them, the law of diminishing returns kicks in. If it weren't for the fact that the majority of the people I administer are Mac users, and Macs are (so far) pretty immune to this crap, I'd probably go insane, quit my job, and spend the rest of my life huddled over an Atari 800.

But back to the board. Do you have the option of blocking IP addresses? If you can, I'd be happy to compile a list of every IP address range in China, Korea, and Russia. That would be a good starting point.