The Great Spamming of July 25th

A spot to talk website specific issues
Post Reply
chalmers
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 5602
Joined: Thu Sep 23, 2010 4:17 pm
Name: Chris
Location: Halifax / On The Road Again
Contact:

The Great Spamming of July 25th

Post by chalmers » Fri Jul 26, 2019 8:21 am

Hey folks,

Just a note to say thanks to those of you who reported the posts, and to RubberToe who assisted in cleaning up the hundreds of spams posts and dozen-plus users we got hit with yesterday. Feel free to fire me an email or text if you encounter that again, so we can act quickly and nip it in the bud.

Cheers,
chalmers

User avatar
RubberToe
Award Winner 13
Award Winner 13
Posts: 3743
Joined: Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:47 am
Name: Rob
Location: Dartmouth
Contact:

Re: The Great Spamming of July 25th

Post by RubberToe » Fri Jul 26, 2019 8:47 am

For some background...

We used to get a lot of spammers / spam bots and it was difficult to manage. We were using the Google eCaptcha plugin but it wasn't effective so then I decided to set the board to admin verification for new signups. However for every new signup I had to determine what was a spam bot vs a real user. That became difficult to manage since the new registrants list was flooded with the bad guys.

Between last fall (IIRC) and this May I fell behind in verifying new users so I decided to try one of the other spam protection plugins - question and answer with 3 rotating questions and specific capitalization. I'm surprised how well it worked... at first.

Well it seems that yesterday morning that was beat by the spammers. I'm surprised it lasted that long.

I've set the board back to admin verification for new users until I'm happy with another spam protection plugin.

Cheers,
-Rob
Electric Brewery Build
On tap at RubberToe's:
Sometimes on a Sunday Belgian Dubbel, Oaked Old Ale, Ordinary Bitter

User avatar
LiverDance
Award Winner 6
Award Winner 6
Posts: 4011
Joined: Fri Sep 24, 2010 4:50 pm
Name: Brian
Location: Sprybeeria

Re: The Great Spamming of July 25th

Post by LiverDance » Fri Jul 26, 2019 9:35 am

Thanks for your hard work once again! :cheers:
"Twenty years ago — a time, by the way, that hops such as Simcoe and Citra were already being developed, but weren’t about to find immediate popularity — there wasn’t a brewer on earth who would have gone to the annual Hop Growers of American convention and said, “I’m going to have a beer that we make 4,000 barrels of, one time a year. It flies off the shelf at damn near $20 a six-pack, and you know what it smells like? It smells like your cat ate your weed and then pissed in the Christmas tree.” - Bell’s Brewery Director of Operations John Mallet on the scent of their popular Hopslam.

User avatar
RubberToe
Award Winner 13
Award Winner 13
Posts: 3743
Joined: Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:47 am
Name: Rob
Location: Dartmouth
Contact:

Re: The Great Spamming of July 25th

Post by RubberToe » Fri Jul 26, 2019 10:05 am

:cheers:

There are several more registered spam bots... the stupid admin UI of phpBB doesn't just let me list registered users for bulk operations. It's going to take a while to remove them - sometime when I'm not at work. One of them just PM'd me a link to its captcha buster software! LOL.

So, we may see some new spam from old bots. This one registered earlier this morning.
Electric Brewery Build
On tap at RubberToe's:
Sometimes on a Sunday Belgian Dubbel, Oaked Old Ale, Ordinary Bitter

User avatar
Naboo
Award Winner 1
Award Winner 1
Posts: 135
Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2017 5:26 pm
Name: David
Location: Truro, NS

Re: The Great Spamming of July 25th

Post by Naboo » Fri Jul 26, 2019 1:14 pm

That's a shame, I was hoping to look through some of those threads this weekend :drool:

chalmers
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 5602
Joined: Thu Sep 23, 2010 4:17 pm
Name: Chris
Location: Halifax / On The Road Again
Contact:

Re: The Great Spamming of July 25th

Post by chalmers » Fri Jul 26, 2019 5:22 pm

Naboo wrote:That's a shame, I was hoping to look through some of those threads this weekend :drool:
Don’t worry, I saved all the links, will send them to your work address. ;)


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Post Reply

Return to “Site Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 15 guests