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Spam

The list we had this morning was actually bigger than that. Thanks for reporting!

These are mostly very sophisticated bots and it's a plague at the moment on companies, businesses, and community sites.

We have been interviewing "bot mitigation" services recently to determine the best company to meet our needs. We will be implementing something to help prevent this type of vandalism for 2018.
 
Just deleted a bunch more this morning. We delete them as soon as we see them or read reports about them and thanks so much for bringing our attention to these, guys!

We have to sleep sometime and I think that's when they like to take advantage.
 
Just deleted a bunch more this morning. We delete them as soon as we see them or read reports about them and thanks so much for bringing our attention to these, guys!

We have to sleep sometime and I think that's when they like to take advantage.

Maybe add a recaptcha for post creation, takes 2 seconds for humans (us) to do and can be just that little bit harder for the bots.
 
Maybe add a recaptcha for post creation, takes 2 seconds for humans (us) to do and can be just that little bit harder for the bots.

Believe it or not, we have recaptcha during the signup process as well as email account verification. These bots actually are groups of bots that work in concert with one another for all of these tasks.

We Admins were in several bot mitigation demonstrations last week and it really opened our eyes as to how prolific and sophisticated they are these days. I was a developer for the banking industry for many years and I am fairly experienced with security and breach prevention protocols. These new gen bots are incredibly capable.

We will get a new service to eliminate as much of this as is humanly possible shortly after the 1st of the year.
 
Absolutely understood, still feels like it's becoming only worse

You are CORRECT! They usually tend to stack up after 10PM EST and continue through 10AM EST. We eliminate all those that attempt to stack up through the day, but we have only a couple of Mods that work on the other side of the planet while we here in the states are asleep.

We have just two more bot mitigation companies to interview and then we will implementing one of them.

We feel your pain with this issue and we also apologize for not having a solution in place sooner. It's only over the past four months where it has truly become as unmanageable as it is now.

We will either pay a service, or add a person, specifically to resolve this issue over the next couple of weeks.
 
The late night spam bots that I see post are always (& I mean always) in non-english. It can't be that difficult to setup thresholds of detected non-english posts, in large numbers, from the same user/ip.
 
I don't have the server logs but there should be some similarities. IP 'C' blocks or User-Agent strings ...

Google Proxy in Chrome is another issue to consider.
As mentioned above the character set used is Chinese that should not be that hard to filter in PHP (xenforo)
How to remove chinese characters in a string

View attachment 12457

Only the English words will be in the post. Making posting in Chinese a total waste of time ;)
Perhaps, they will just go away :)

**You could also do preg_match {Han} and generate an error unknown message -- in Han Chinese >:0)

Maybe, I can use this eventually myself ...


Graybeard, Jan 18, 2018
 
We have eliminated the Asian spams. Have not seen a report on them in a couple of months now.

We implemented something similar @Graybeard ., as well as a few other measures.
 
Ban '/' in the thread titles as in http:// that will reduce it for a while -- thread titles are NOT nofollow as they are found indexed -- this is what they are trying to accomplish (me thinks).
 
Ban '/' in the thread titles as in http:// that will reduce it for a while -- thread titles are NOT nofollow as they are found indexed -- this is what they are trying to accomplish (me thinks).

Correct! Hadn't thought about the http//: for the thread titles, just sent that off to my developer.

The nutra stuff is difficult due to the nature of our content. If we restrict too many phrase, it causes loads of posting errors. This is a work in progress. The Mods are on it when they see them. We will have a solution for this at some point soon.
 
Then someone has to moderate the first post. Real people get turned-off. We all lose that way. So, yes bad idea. Better to just cut the spammers access off by filtering IMHO.
 
MI
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