Spam issue

Save me!

Robots are stealing our forum

So much now, it's just ridiculous... I seem to remember Monty Python wrote a song which sums up the current situation rather well!

Can't believe its happening to this site.

Where are the mods?

Cleaned it all up again, it didn't take long, but we have to sleep some time...

Every restriction we put on new signups affects legit users too - things like manually approving posts or limiting to one post on first day presents extra barriers to entry for new users joining the community. The existing link blocking was very effective when we first implemented it, but still is inconvenient for some new users, especially in bug reports. We need to improve our automated spam detection somehow, but without tightening the restrictions on new users so much that they don't feel welcome or that they can participate as much as they want to.

This latest wave is tricky because it all seems to come from different IPs (I'm banning them all, it doesn't seem to help much), it's circumventing the signup captcha somehow, and they're not posting real links (which makes the whole exercise pretty pointless, but what do spammers care... sigh...). Tom happens to be away at the moment but he's back in a few days and should be able to find a way to cut this out automatically. Until then, we'll have to keep cleaning!

Seems to be human-powered registrations coming from a variety of different IP addresses. We're cleaning it all up, but it's difficult to completely prevent this type of spam sometimes. Tom is back in a few days and should be able to find a better way to deal with it.

limit the rate of posts they can make to one per 10 minutes, or something similar?

That's a good idea. It's not possible for a human to create 2 or more meaningful topics in 1 minute.

Only English charactes should be allowed in a topic title, it's an English forum after all (analphabet A-Z plus basic punctuation marks - period, question/exclamation mark, brackets, dash, apostrophe - what else a normal user needs).

All those restrictions could be called off for a trusted member. Someone with account's age greater than a week/month and with 10+ posts.

Wow! I made a post like five seconds ago and it's already being pushed down the list by spam.

Its hard to consider this as sponsored spam, it's not very cost effective. They have to take the time to find new ips, only to waste them in the effort of creating fake emails, and signing up.

Where all Ashley has to do is press a button.

this is not a spam for advertising! or people that will fall under, like yoyogames, that just got sold to a slot machine company (botnet like ) , did i mentioned this might be a botnet attack? i wander what are the odds ... mhmmm

btw Ashley is there a way to translate the Construct 2 engine in other languages? i seen an old plugin integration from r85-6 i think was long time ago, is that still available? i will start a c2 c3 Romania websites community's soon, already reserved the domains! and i kinda need the engine to be in Romanian translated or give me the ability to add change language function!

Most are named "\\?MXD7?COM?\[some non latin characters that can vary]"

if you google that "MXD7?COM" you can see that it has been issue with many sites lately

wow, so spam, much bot, very annoying :doge:

I think someone found a way to post a topic with a normal POST request, and he made a bot.

Something similar happened to me, someone spammed Square Eater (http://bit.ly/1wKDiNT) leaderboards with more than 700 inputs.

One of the possible solutions is to add to Privacy Policy/Terms & Conditions something like that it's forbidden to do that; if you do that, Scirra can denounce ... Then you can contact their internet provider (based on IP) and then you denounce them ...

Hi everyone, I'm also being annoyed with spam topics.

Ashley - Please clean those...

Whole bunch of IPs definitely suggests a botnet. We are still getting hit periodically.

This is kind of an interesting read (especially the part about Bayesian Poisoning):

http://www.embergaming.us/index.php?thr ... tempt.153/