About some of the new members?

[MikeSTI]

this is not for the ones that have posted......


.....has anyone noticed the werd names for new members?

they seem to have www .xxx. com links..........are these computer created accounts from some worm? we seem to be geeting hit with a few a day?

[khail19]

Where's a MOD when you need one!!!!!!!!!! Get to work!!!!!!!

[Nick Koan]

Yeah, I pointed it out to Scott yesterday. So far, its not really a problem, but he's aware that it could become one.

[sperry]

I took care of 'em... they all had .ru (Russia) email addresses. Looks like they're from some weak-ass script.

Also, I've notices a lot of guests lately, but they're *gasp* google bots! So, we've been linked too from enough other boards now, that we're in Google's route.

I think I may have to put a robots.txt file up to limit their access.

[JoelK]

I run a phpBB board, and I've noticed that my board has been getting "new member spam" to the tune of 3-7 new ones/day. The reason they are doing that is to get their websites into memberlists everywhere that Google will crawl, and more links will improve their ranking in the search results.

Since we are a very localized forum, I'd suggest that we could block their IPs from accessing the site. Here's a starter list (you may have to modify it slightly for whatever program you are putting it into - I personally use it at the network (iptables) or web server (apache conf) levels.

213.
81.
62.
193.
212.
165.21.154.
216.12.202.82
64.237.
195.
194.
66.192.
217.
212.0.0.0
202.
12.36.98.

Unfortunately, on my forum, I haven't convinced the boss to do that yet because we have a number of customers that can be scattered throughout the world, and blocking those IPs could deny them access to us. We may block it on the forum, though.

I know it doesn't seem like much, but I don't personally want to get a bunch of porn links on my forum and/or a bunch of junk results when searching Google. I'm going to email Scott a tip that I don't want to post here, just in case those Russian guys notice.

[Dean]

Isn't there a hunk of code that makes a human read a slightly mangled bit of text that is not machine readable to verify their humanity you could use. I know I saw some sample code on some web site when I was working on something else... Tha would eliminate all but manual hacks.

[JoelK]

Yes, I think the mod exists for phpBB. I've never used it, though. I try to make as few changes as possible for easier upgrading.

BTW, email = PM. All the email addresses I could find around here are defunct.

[sperry]

Yeah the board's got a few issues... like the admin email is still the original email from the doink.net days... even though I changed it in the admin panel.

Plus, the email system on the board never seemed that reliable... every mass emailing I've done returns an error, but emails are still sent, so I'm never sure who (if anyone) got missed in the mailing.

And let's not even get into the stuff that's broken in the admin tools.

However, the important stuff works, and there's a new version of the board pending, so I'm just putting off fixing all that crap till I can upgrade everything to the new Olympus board.

However, it looks like 2.0.12 is out... and there are security fixes in it, so I guess I know what I'm doing this week.

[JoelK]

I just upgraded to 2.0.12, and there aren't many files that changed. I just had to modify the overall_footer.tpl file with my custom footer, and that was it. It probably will be relatively painless for you.

[JoelK]

2.0.13 is now out with only two files changed. Looks like it just fixed a security issue.