Spam, spam, spam

[konc]

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=54488#p780968

[Srandista]

viewtopic.php?p=786097#p786097

[GiSWiG]

I'm not sure if this is the right spot but this is where the 'Report a problem' link sent me.

I'm subscribed to the 'List of Free Games' thread and I do receive notifications but occasionally I stop receiving notifications and I have to unsubscribe and resubscribe to fix it. Just today, I saw that Freespace 2 was available for free on GOG and I wanted to share that. I went to the forum and not only did I see that someone already did, I saw that I had not received any notifications since 9/17. I actually did the unsubscribe/resubscribe fix just two-three weeks ago and it had all of a sudden stopped again. When I did that unsubscribe/resubscribe fix, I hadn't received notifications for weeks, maybe over a month. Before that, I was regularly receiving updates for about a year or more. I do receive notifications from other threads which makes this a bit stranger. I have checked spam, and I do use gmail and I have checked all the other tabs that google autosorts emails to and they were not there.

[Qbix]

so it still did list you as subscribed ?

[GiSWiG]

Yes. I had to click 'Unsubscribe' then the 'Subscribe' button. It also shows in my list of subscribed threads

[InjecTioN]

https://forum.vbulletin.com/forum/vbull ... n-the-wild

I can't really see which version VOGONS is using, but it's a serious security issue. Ready to patch things up when necessary?

Good luck!

Edit: Ah! I see @Qbix. Don't know why I related phpBB to vBulletin exactly.

[Qbix]

it's not using vbulletin

[vorvek]

Doesn't the forum send a single notification until you check the thread? So, if there's more posts after the notification, you won't get new notifications.

[Cyrix200+]

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=41958

[konc]

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=69707

[konc]

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=41988

[Miphee]

(All this spamming and double (triple) user trolling would go away if active members had to register a phone number to be able to comment. It works just fine on other forums.)

[Cyrix200+]

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=42084

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=69941

[bjwil1991]

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=42165

[VileRancour]

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=42220

Several threads, still at it as we speak...

[Cyrix200+]

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=42228

[Dominus]

Thanks!

[gdjacobs]

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=42247

[yawetaG]

https://www.vogons.org/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=42247

Is happily busy spamming tons of old threads.

[ssokolow]

(All this spamming and double (triple) user trolling would go away if active members had to register a phone number to be able to comment. It works just fine on other forums.)

I assume you mean SMS verification. What about those of us who don't have smartphones?

I'm on Discord, but I've warned my friends that, if I ever happen to trip over an IP address that was used to abuse the service, I'll stop responding without warning because Discord explicitly says that no exceptions will be made to their "one suspicious sign-on, and your account is locked until you SMS verify" policy.

Heck, given how big Discord has become as a communication service, if I had the time to engage in such legal activity, I'd see if the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal would be willing to declare such an artificial dependency on SMS in the country with the highest mobile rates in the developed world to be discrimination against the poor and penalize Discord for it.

(Plus, there do exist services that are SMS equivalents to disposable e-mail address providers, so you'd be locking out legitimate users like me while spammers wouldn't fear account deletion enough to be fazed by the prospect of using disposable SMS providers to verify.)

The proper solution is to lock something inherent to the spammers' efforts, like posting URLs, behind some kind of reputation-based system, so abandoning/losing an existing account identified as being a source of spam and creating a new one sets them back to square one.

Heck, for my contact forms, the big problem was SEO spam bots, so I got rid of 99% of spam just by disallowing [/url], [/link], and </a> with a plain English message asking users to use bare URLs instead, because the form generates a plaintext e-mail, and also requiring a words-to-URLs ratio of at least 2:1 "because I want at least some descriptive text on the URLs people submit".

The rest was spam selling things like SEO and paid visitors to me as a webmaster, and I was able to kill 99% of that by adding some other "check and politely ask for correction" blocks that hit on the properties of their form letter formats which I wouldn't want from a real human either. (eg. e-mail addresses outside the reply-to field in messages submitted with JavaScript disabled, the same URL appearing more than once in the same message, URLs disguised by known URL shorteners, and the word "unsubscribe".

(Identifying characteristics that I legitimately don't want from anyone sending me a plaintext e-mail, which happen to trip up spammers disproportionately, has become a bit of a game for me, to be honest. I could have easily killed off every spam submission I've seen in the last two years just by disallowing submissions from visitors with " UBrowser/" in their User-Agent string, but I'm trying not to use blacklists and the URL shortener blacklist was bad enough.)