Modern Vespa

We're particularly under seige at the mo...I think I've deleted most of the offending posts,but if anyone sees any suspect posts,feel free to let me know.

Glad to see your on it Ian.

Thank you and the rest of the mods....and Jess.

Thanks for keeping this an enjoyable place to spend the day and night.

Very much appreciated.

Today, I joined the forum of a local riding group that uses phpBB. Within 10 seconds posts started appearing on that forum, under my membership name, linking to the porn movies. A post was made to every forum and every active thread. I started deleting the posts and they just kept showing up on evry thread. Luckily this was a new forum, few threads and even fewer active members. I had to call the webmaster and have him delete my membership. He ended up shutting down the forum so that he could try to figure out what was happening.

We had the same situation on Burgman USA about a month ago. I moderate there and one morning we had over 35 of the same links post show up. I think whom ever is doing this is setting it up to hook on to new members and post immediately. On both site you do have to verify a text box or answer a question to register. These spammers are getting very good at bypassing the safety nets.

Janine

Saw two yesterday, one looked inviting, someone undressing directed to a certain website. Ignored both and logged out of MV. When I logged back in, they were both gone.
Pretty slick how they are able to port through the BB system.

I just deleted a bunch as well. Seems someone has finally figured out how to get past my filters. All the spam accounts (there were three that I know of) were the same individual (or bot). Oh, and they hit Modern Buddy as well.

I've got more tricks up my sleeve, though.

... let them rest on their laurels for a bit before you release the sharks with lasers on their heads

Good on ya, Jess. Thanks again.

Oh, and by the way: Every phpbb forum on the planet is under constant siege right now, and has been for about the last 6 months. It's getting worse. We've got some particularly clever (and mostly effective) countermeasures in place here on Modern Vespa and Modern Buddy, but literally there are 4 or 5 attempts per day to register a spam account, almost all of them automated "bots".

If you look at some unattended forums (vespaspeed.com comes to mind, but there are many others) and look at the memberlist, you will see literally thousands of spam users. Then take a look at the "ET2 Tuning" forum area, and you'll see thousands of spam messages.

It's war out there. And bloody, at that. Spammers have gotten more and more aggressive, and more and more sophisticated. Eventually, they may very well win, at which point every public forum on the planet will be on the brink of collapse.

I have been out of the IT world for several years now, so I haven't kept up on it enough. But I was curious if you know how effective the graphic scrambled word part of registering at many sites is, or if the spammers are finding ways around those easily? Now I can't remember if you had that on here when I registered... shoot.

I like the new membership registration where you have to type in what you
see in a little box which has generated text and numbers in it, That seems to stop the bots.

Great job keeping the spam down...Now if I could just stay logged in somehow.

Dave