February 20 2010, 02:52:36 #1318 [Y/N 0 Agree] [Y/N 0 S] [Y/N 0 T] [@]
why are there 8 new threads about nothing?
Replies: 14
February 20 2010, 03:43:53 #1319 [Y/N 0 Agree] [Y/N 0 S] [Y/N 0 T] [@]
I dunno, but they've been ignored.
February 20 2010, 14:12:18 #1328 [Y/N 0 Agree] [Y/N 0 S] [Y/N 0 T] [@]
Operator here, sorry about the spamflux, I won't have access to a computer until late monday. Keep ignoring the crap and feel free to make good threads to counter.
February 21 2010, 01:43:25 #1337 [Y/N 0 Agree] [Y/N 0 S] [Y/N 0 T] [@]
m.essag.es, of all places to be spammed.
February 21 2010, 02:54:29 #1340 [Y/N 0 Agree] [Y/N 0 S] [Y/N 0 T] [@]
I suspected as such (and ignored as per everyone else) just wanted to know for sure
February 22 2010, 02:26:17 #1369 [Y/N 0 Agree] [Y/N 0 S] [Y/N 0 T] [@]
Alright guys, sorry about that crap.
Here's what I've done:
* Fixed an issue that allowed creation of blank threads
* Threads without replies are not archived, period
* Threads without replies are deleted after six hours... kind of lame but for now just bump your own threads after 5 hours if you want them not to die. This will be a non-issue when we have some traffic.
* Threads without replies are automatically saged when you ignore them
* Threads without replies will be deleted faster if more than 1 person has saged (by ignoring)
* Threads are not archived unless the board activity is high - this is to prevent spam storms from pushing good threads off into the archive.
February 22 2010, 03:19:17 #1375 [Y/N 0 Agree] [Y/N 0 S] [Y/N 0 T] [@]
what defines "board activity"? wouldn't an influx of spam increase "board activity"?
February 22 2010, 04:02:18 #1376 [Y/N 0 Agree] [Y/N 0 S] [Y/N 0 T] [@]
sounds like a pretty decent fix for now.
incidently this thread has 1337 in it :]
February 22 2010, 08:57:20 #1386 [Y/N 0 Agree] [Y/N 0 S] [Y/N 0 T] [@]
@1375 It measures by average # of posts across all threads... there have to be 50 threads and they have to have an average of 17-18 replies for the board to be considered "active". I may raise that.
I might also start collecting the content they're posting and try blocking them.
February 23 2010, 13:56:52 #1436 [Y/N 0 Agree] [Y/N 0 S] [Y/N 0 T] [@]
So I think I have an idea of what this attack is about. It looks like some a-hole runs a spambot, probably a botnet, that spams open posting comments/forums and then eventually he comes and posts about how to contact him to get off the spam list, which presumably involves money or is otherwise BS.
m.essag.es does not negotiate with terrorists!
February 23 2010, 18:55:18 #1447 [Y/N 0 Agree] [Y/N 0 S] [Y/N 0 T] [@]
running a spambot? ip blocking?
February 23 2010, 19:00:52 #1448 [Y/N 0 Agree] [Y/N 0 S] [Y/N 0 T] [@]
@1447 It'd be extremely surprising if the posts all came from the same address, since it's probably a botnet and possibly even using proxies... and I don't track IP addresses anyway so it'd be hard to do that.
I have a plan for a spam filter that should work wonderfully for this crap because it only posts the same few messages.
February 23 2010, 22:46:17 #1460 [Y/N 0 Agree] [Y/N 0 S] [Y/N 0 T] [@]
Good news: the spam filter is now learning - when a thread is posted, not replied to, and deleted because of it, the MD5 hash of the message is stored in the database along with a timestamp.
If somebody tries to post the message again (as a new thread), it will fail silently and the attempt will be counted in the database.
After 24 hours the message block will be removed if it has not been attempted again. Each attempt adds another 24 hours before the block will be removed. If you run into a problem just modify your post even by one character (other than spaces at the beginning or end, those are ignored) and you should be able to post just fine.
Once we stop seeing the posts I'm going to increase the unreplied thread lifetime to 12 hours or so since it shouldn't be as important.