Dungeon Master Forum

...why the general RTC forums are getting hit with some spam posts recently, and what can be done to help stop it?

I've only seen three and deleted them all immediately. If it gets worse, we'll have to enforce everyone to register, though I think it might be possible to ban users based on IP address...

Fourth one cropped up yesterday night, but for the sake of one spammer I odn't want to stop casual people from posting saying hi or asking questions...bloody spammers ruin it for everything. Forgot about the IP ban, should have checked it/done it before the delete

well forced login is not too bad.. but then we also need one o them visual letter thingies to varify real people

I'm guessing the forum is popular in some kind of search and they find and post.. probably a worm or some kind..

The forums already have the visual confirmation thingie. It was a bit buggered, but I fixed it which stopped all those Russian spammers a few months ago...

I also had some spam messages on my forum these last days.
Damn spammer robots that post on every forum they can find...

Essentially, We have to eliminate automatically all postings from spammer robots and discourage all manual spam, while leaving as much freedom as possible to members and to our welcomed visitors.

As spammers now often use zombies, I'm afraid that banning users based on IP address will not be very effective.

I don't know to what extent it is easy with phbBB to implement validation scripts to postings, but I have the following suggestions:

-implement the "rel=nofollow" spec on all links in posts, and indicate this on the post editing page, this will scare away all manual link spammers, as this makes all their efforts useless.
-indicate on the post editing page that to eliminate spam, we had to implement the following rules :
A) posts from guest accounts are =automatically= rejected if they contain any link, email address or embedded image (only plain text will pass).
B) The same rules apply to accounts less than one week old or with less than two posts.
C) The email, private message, web pages, aim buttons are disabled for the same accounts.
D) If it's not enough : for these accounts : filter out the messages containing the $ sign, or any sequence of more than 3 digits (to eliminate phone numbers and zip codes )

For spammers time is money and won't bother to (re)write messages satisfying these rules. They just want to be contacted easily and as fast as possible.

I'm sure that visitors who come to say Hi or to ask questions will not mind these rules and will not be inconvenienced by them. After all, they hate spam as much as we do.

Just so you know, in case you decide to delete people who have never made a post or whatever, someone joined about a week ago with the username "Rachel_Westwood" - she is an RL friend of mine and only registered on the forum so we can hog the chat room with discussions about the story we are writing (as some people have already experienced) . So don't delete her if you start to go about doing so .

Ah, I did spot her and wondered who she was

And really, if it becomes a big problem then disabling html in guest posts might be a good idea, but since the problem hasn't worsened and we aren't flooded - five posts this week - I would hang fire. If it's a wave that is passing no reason to make life miserable for everyone including the people who just guest post. I was just worried incase we started getting flooded before.

the fact is: IT will happen again.
even if it doesn´t precaucions are only wise..
donno how much labor that is ... could be a hell of work, but maybe a bit of practice, too.