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This morning the first spammer account was killed by a new extension for the boards. The only testament to his existance was a single report thread in staff area. And thus our first victory has occured.
Over the last couple of days comment spammers have struck ENWorld serveral times. What used to be a once a month thing has become a once every other week thing, maybe even weekly. Comment spam posts are at their least annoying, and at worst can provide links to sites which have malicious code waiting to attempt to attack your computer (and if you use IE they're likely to succeed).
While the moderators with your help have been able to knock these things down within an hour of their posting, the resultant mess is still a pain. It takes time away from the moderators to manually delete the 5 or so posts spammers make before their accounts are closed - time that could be better spent doing other things.
In response to this problem I've developed a system that compares the posts of relatively new posters against a list of known spam sites. Spammers can spoof their email, their IP's, but if customers are to reach them they must leave a valid URL, and therein lies the key curtailing their activities. If the system finds one of the blacklisted sites in their message it will immediatly ban them and post a message for the moderators to review.
It is possible, though unlikely, that a legitimate user could get banned this way. If this does occur the ban will be lifted once the post is reviewed. It is also possible that spammers will occasionally get through this system. When this happens we'll ban them manually and adjust the system. However, each time we force spammers to register a new DNS we cost them money. Eventually they'll go under or leave us alone.
You don't seem to want to accept the fact that you're dealing with an expert in guerrila warfare. With a man who's the best-with guns, with knives, with his bare hands. A man who's been trained to ignore pain, ignore weather, to live off the land, to eat things that would make a billy goat puke. In Vietnam his job was to dispose of enemy personnel, to kill, period! Win by attrition. Well, Rambo was the best!
Andargor
__________________ It is by will alone I set my die in motion.
It is by gaming that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning.
It is by will alone I set my die in motion.
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OMG! The SKY IS FALLING! --JoeGKushner
Myself, I plan to masturbate less -- der_kluge
I know that I've never really liked d20. I think it was designed by a bunch of hacks --- Monte Cook
I am sickened beyond belief. The half-orc wizard is obviously the best possible PC, and I only had to read 10 pages of the book to figure it out. D&D is dead to me! -- Mike Mearls
FWIW, I'm on the design team and I pretty much find WoW as fun and interesting as banging my head against a brick wall. -- Mike Mearls
you happen to say that 4E reminds you of the reasons you decided against a career as a special-Ed teacher--noted rpg author Darrin Drader
Michael, can we get a list of the "banned" sites so that we know not to inadvertantly post a link to any of them?
Once a user clears a certain number of posts the system stops scanning their posts, primarily cause scanning that list is pretty processor intensive. I won't say what the number is exactly, but it's high enough to deter spammers and low enough not to bother regular users.
Besides, the whole list is seven pages long and has a lot of words the censor system would wack.
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