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How to possibly stop these spam attacks

Posted: Sat Oct 22, 2011 11:12 am
by Tdarcos
Prohibit posts with links by people without registration and require registration with mail response to be able to post something with a link. And that's the key, I suspect. No link means no click-thrus, no click-thrus=no money. These aren't being posted for the "thrill" of vandalizing, they're being posted to get money through lots of spamming where the spam contain links to sites that pay for them. No ability to make fast money means they go on to easier targets.

Wikipedia found that one of the things that stopped SEO spam was adding the "nofollow" value to the outbound links. You get no Google credit for these links and thus you can't flood Wikipedia with them to game the system and steal high-quality inbound links.

Posted: Sat Oct 22, 2011 3:07 pm
by Flack
It wouldn't matter. Those spam attacks come from scripts, not people. All you would end up with would be a bunch of spammy posts full of non-working links.

Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2011 5:03 am
by Tdarcos
Flack wrote:It wouldn't matter. Those spam attacks come from scripts, not people. All you would end up with would be a bunch of spammy posts full of non-working links.
You didn't listen. I said "prohibit posts," meaning if the post has a link, it's rejected; the script won't recognize this and is defeated.

Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2011 11:18 am
by Tdarcos
Tdarcos wrote:
Flack wrote:It wouldn't matter. Those spam attacks come from scripts, not people. All you would end up with would be a bunch of spammy posts full of non-working links.
You didn't listen. I said "prohibit posts," meaning if the post has a link, it's rejected; the script won't recognize this and is defeated.
And I realize that the way I phrased it could have meant to refuse to translate a link leaving it as text as opposed to rejecting the post altogether, my apologies for the misunderstanding. The idea is to stop scripted attacks.

Another possibility is to require captcha on non-registered users and registered users whose accounts are aged less than 7 days. Wikipedia does this with "semi-protected" pages; you have to have a registered account and it has to have been around more than 4 days. This chases off the typical spammers who want fast quick-hit results.

I still think the answer is to back-track and follow the money, draining the swamp will kill the alligators, err I mean stopping the money would get rid of most of the spam. That, and what Jonsey did, tracking down where the spam comes from and neutralizing their servers, either by shutting down the botnets, blocking known spam generating addresses or domains, closing down the spam hosts in the case of e-mail spam servers, and stopping credit card charges to spam merchants.

Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2011 12:16 pm
by ICJ
I made it so I have to approve any new member. I hate doing that because I'd like people to be able to register and post immediately. That being said, they can already kind of do that by posting as guest and filling in a user name.

So the particular method used by the Chinese fucks* won't work any more.

*I know they probably just used Chinese zombie machines. I love that the Great Firewall of China allowed people to get to JC, though, and it was ME who had to block THEM.

Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2011 2:00 am
by Tdarcos
ICJ wrote:I made it so I have to approve any new member. I hate doing that because I'd like people to be able to register and post immediately. That being said, they can already kind of do that by posting as guest and filling in a user name.

So the particular method used by the Chinese fucks* won't work any more.

*I know they probably just used Chinese zombie machines. I love that the Great Firewall of China allowed people to get to JC, though, and it was ME who had to block THEM.
You should have let it be known your site has lots of favorable comments about Falun Gong; how the Communists who run China need to be overthrown and given the "Ghaddafi treatment"; and/or how Taiwan is an independent country that China has no legitimate claim; and/or that Tibet deserves independence, and your site would have been locked out of China "faster than a rabbit gets fucked!"

Just change the access code from "Zork1" to "I approve and support Falun Gong" and see how fast the Great Firewall of China locks your site out of access!