SnowJapan Moderator SnowJapan.Com#4 5 Posted September 22, 2006 SnowJapan Moderator Share Posted September 22, 2006 I'm not a particularly technical person but wanted to ask if anyone had any ideas. We have our SJ Questionnaire online and recently we have these clowns filling out the form with the usual spam and meaningless drivel. At the moment we get probably over 30 of these a day. Content pretty much the same so it looks like it is the same people. Why, I wonder, I can't see how they are getting any benefit at all from it. Then there's the recent sudden increase in Forums registrations with similar drivel written in the registration form, each coming from the same email address. Do they actually think we are going to approve them? I dread to think what the forums would be like now if anyone could post without being registered.... Link to post Share on other sites
Goemon 0 Posted September 22, 2006 Share Posted September 22, 2006 Spambots are taking over teh intarwebs. Please defend the forums! Link to post Share on other sites
big-will 7 Posted September 22, 2006 Share Posted September 22, 2006 I often wonder what on earth spammers and the like get out of what they do - and the idiots that respond or do whatever they do to make it worthwhile for the spammers. Link to post Share on other sites
thursday 1 Posted September 22, 2006 Share Posted September 22, 2006 there are programs that do this, that's why Yahoo has the optical recognition for characters so skewed that only a warped person can read. Link to post Share on other sites
bobby12 0 Posted September 22, 2006 Share Posted September 22, 2006 Weird, if they were wanting to do mail injections or something to send spam theyd surely have a more sophistaced system in place, at least using diff email addresses each time. so its probably just some total weirdo who somehow found this site and took a liking to it. Link to post Share on other sites
thursday 1 Posted September 22, 2006 Share Posted September 22, 2006 Quote: Originally posted by bobby12: so its probably just some total weirdo who somehow found this site and took a liking to it. that sounds like most of us here. Link to post Share on other sites
bushpig 0 Posted September 22, 2006 Share Posted September 22, 2006 could be a young kid with too much time?? Link to post Share on other sites
SnowJapan Admin SnowJapan#Andrew 6 Posted September 23, 2006 SnowJapan Admin Share Posted September 23, 2006 Way too much time...manually filling out a form 30 times a day?!? Link to post Share on other sites
kintaro 0 Posted September 23, 2006 Share Posted September 23, 2006 SJ#4, I'd say most of us that do post probably do so for two reasons. We are bored with our jobs, lives, etc, but more importantly there are some pretty interesting discussions on this forum and the level of intelect (myself not included) is quite high. For the others I would suspect they log on, go through the process and do so for much of the same reasons but for one reason or another they don't have anything to say or don't know how to say it. And of course there are just some nuts out there (sorry nuts!) Or of course there are those that are simply felonious people with nothing but bad intentions Link to post Share on other sites
SnowJapan Admin SnowJapan#Andrew 6 Posted September 23, 2006 SnowJapan Admin Share Posted September 23, 2006 Kintaro, thanks. Yes I agree. But in these cases we are talking about peope filling in the Forums registration fields with things like this: Location: sefwerfiewjfoweisf Nationality: dzfifiseofsefowsfosijdfoij Signature: sefpisjdfoidsfsfjsofjseeofs etc And then doing the same thing going though new registration forms with similar literally minutes later. For the Questionnaire forms, we're getting more conventional spam content (viagra, adjustable beds etc). It's hard to understand why people might totally waste their time on things like this. It doesn't take us long to delete trash like this, but there has been a noticably large increase in the last few months. The thing that takes more time is the huge amount of junk mail that comes in to our addresses. Probably a 4 figure number each day. We do have filters and the like to get rid of it quickly but it's still a pain. And one that is gradually getting worse unfortunately. Link to post Share on other sites
Thunderpants 0 Posted September 23, 2006 Share Posted September 23, 2006 could it be that there are young people out there testing their bot programs? Link to post Share on other sites
SnowJapan Admin SnowJapan#Andrew 6 Posted September 23, 2006 SnowJapan Admin Share Posted September 23, 2006 I'm not totally up to date with all this spam nonsense... I just know that it is annoying and increasing. Out of interest, how would they know if their "test" was successful if we just delete and completely ignore? Link to post Share on other sites
Thunderpants 0 Posted September 23, 2006 Share Posted September 23, 2006 not sure, but they would certainly know they were unsuccessful. Link to post Share on other sites
Thunderpants 0 Posted September 23, 2006 Share Posted September 23, 2006 which also is good to know if you are in that business Link to post Share on other sites
SnowJapan Admin SnowJapan#Andrew 6 Posted September 23, 2006 SnowJapan Admin Share Posted September 23, 2006 If that is what some people are doing, for whatever reason, they sure don't give up easy! Link to post Share on other sites
SnowJapan Admin SnowJapan#Andrew 6 Posted September 23, 2006 SnowJapan Admin Share Posted September 23, 2006 What might that "business" be called? Link to post Share on other sites
Thunderpants 0 Posted September 23, 2006 Share Posted September 23, 2006 i am sure that a program that can create accounts on 1% of the worlds online forums, which in turn can generate clicks from 1% of the users there would create some kind of income for people like this: Link to post Share on other sites
damian 0 Posted September 23, 2006 Share Posted September 23, 2006 Ocean11 as a child. Link to post Share on other sites
misorano 1 Posted September 23, 2006 Share Posted September 23, 2006 As thursday says, it sounds like a program is doing it. Some company will be claiming the ability to register at 10 million sites with the click of a button. They would have picked up this site and added all the data on the registration page, and linked it to their software. We have the same problem with links. We vet all the links and only allow travel links, but we get about 30-40 new links a day for the "want a whopper penis" type site. Some solutions are to: 1. Change the name of the registration page (but they'll find you again) 2. Change the names of the fields on the registration form (but again this is easy to find out) 3. Use a image type recognition system (like Earthnet does for the email) Link to post Share on other sites
bobby12 0 Posted September 23, 2006 Share Posted September 23, 2006 I normally use an image verification system to prevent these bot attacks. Its not so hard to do, just install GD library to your PHP and read the php documentation on how to make a random image. Example: All the bot attacks I had before were mail injection attempts. You can tell if its mail injection if there is stuff like 'content-type:' somewhere in the nonsense characters (which by the way are characters from a file they are attempting to attach to the mail injection). To be honest, if you are not preventing this kind of thing, then I'd have a good look at all the security in the site. cleaning up all post data etc. Link to post Share on other sites
SnowJapan Admin SnowJapan#Andrew 6 Posted September 23, 2006 SnowJapan Admin Share Posted September 23, 2006 (Having said this about idiots and a few simple forms, there is no need to worry about our site security, by the way.) Link to post Share on other sites
me jane 0 Posted September 23, 2006 Share Posted September 23, 2006 Bobby 12, am I imagining things or do the numbers in your example change everytime I open this thread? It says ac12 now. I'm sure there was an f in it earlier?! Link to post Share on other sites
me jane 0 Posted September 23, 2006 Share Posted September 23, 2006 Oh cool, it really does change, now its c623! Busy day at work today as you can tell! Thanks for all the good work keeping the junk off this forum SJ admin peeps! Link to post Share on other sites
SnowJapan Moderator SnowJapan.Com#4 5 Posted September 23, 2006 Author SnowJapan Moderator Share Posted September 23, 2006 Unfortunately, it gets gradually more difficult rather than easier as time goes on, me jane! But it's worth it... so many great characters on here. Link to post Share on other sites
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