Massive spam attack

[CDEAN]

We seem to be under a serious attack from spammers right now. On average one new person joining every 5 minutes. And I've noticed some of them have started putting stuff like "CA" or "US" or "russia" (lower-case r) under their location, so I think there's a real person behind it too. Don't be fooled by profile info.

EliasOtukolo, fatetryshalty, jennylagarce, moothefethymn, newbalanceoutlet1t, Nfoyspoy, ObligoWeege, oraweersnor, Orieddege, prubsekeertip, QVlaquanda, Spoutlelo, SteeloMut, Weiplepault, xiaojingcatypopgdex, Crumedord, DonaldGT, fKriayrG, Awaitiadele, Crumedord, Flumdrumn, gallagher924, johnston343, ReiliaBarihor, Sitian4xh, touchnova, TyncTiday, ABODYTAUPPY, ACTIONAOPERNE, apasyDago, Ashly, buchalandable, Hedogellelext, lindsay976, LowSnonek, madeleine494, Nahamouff, ReiliaBarihor, ReobbyVioto, Totausado.

^Those are all spambots that have joined in the last hour.

[CDEAN]

There's too many joining to count now. 70 guests and the number is steadily rising.

We need to do something to prevent these bots from joining. Close registration for a few days, or add some kind of arrowhead related question, or something

[ShowmeMoflint]

The spammers will never make it past administration. Admins approve every member that come through the door and cannot post until they have been approved.

[CDEAN]

Isn't it kind of annoying to have 20+ spambots clogging up the online member list though?

[Indianasmith]

I'm an admin at the old PROS board, which has become pretty inactive since this place fired up. We get maybe a half dozen posts on a good day. But we still have 20-30 spammers a day try to join, sometimes as many as 50. I reject them all, but I don't know how to stop them from applying for membership except to ban certain IP's, and I don't know how to do that. But some of the names you wrote above look awfully familiar.

[tomclark]

There's always stuff on the forum for the board software, in the case of this forum it's vBulletin.

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/portal.php

On old PROS we can't upgrade or change any of the software because we don't own it and mods can't do stuff that only Admins are allowed to do, like adding "Captcha's" and such to keep bots from joining and rejoining. Some forum software has lists of known spammers, like a windows host file, that can take out many IP addresses from joining. On PROS, hardly anyone will ever get in with an IP from outside the country. PS: good job, Indy, I've been remiss, boom. We ban the username, the host and the IP address..usually. Lately been too many and just getting rejected. When they are rejected and not added to a ban, they will retry to join under different nonsense names. Hit their IP and hope they are not using some real members IP as a fake! That has happened.,

[Scotto]

I have a lot of guests on my forum right now, and I assume there's a lot of spammers TRYING to register, but they cannot.

I block by IP prefix, from exactly where they are registering from. End of problems.

[CDEAN]

Wow, 12 hours later and they're STILL joining constantly.

[ShowmeMoflint]

Sounds like to me the spammers are trying to flood the system to gain access or shut it down completely. It is known as cyber terrorism probably is a good idea to shut down registration for bit at least until the upgrades are done this month.

[CDEAN]

Yeah. When you look at the member list and half of the members online are spambots, something is very wrong.