Michael Morris
First Post
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.
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.
