Comment spamming scum

kguske · Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 4638

Even if you require membership to post comments, yet there are those who go through the effort of registering just so they can post spam comments. Get a life, losers! Smack

Not one to whine without suggesting options.... I think we should add the ability to suspend users, block domain registration and delete all comments by a user from the news screen when viewed by an admin.

Other ideas?

montego · Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 6:39 am

Completely agree kguske. In fact, I would even extend that feature a bit by auto-banning and removing all content by this person throughout ALL of nuke... You do something clearly against my TOS and you are "wiped clean from my nuke db"...

persona_non_grata · Joined: Posts: 0

are you guys just starting now to tighten the rules...? killing me

ive been doing that for a very long time...

a few samples.....
if you signup 2 times within a few minutes with different names,id etc,...ill ban your ass.,this includes full ban....lol

if you register without entering your real name to the registration you will be rejected,i do suggest that they try again....lol,and they do.,....

registrations with a temporary address are denied,and funny thing is....they NEVER complaint as to why.......makes you wonder huh....

yeah....with sentinel the litle kid in me is having a great time banning people that dont value what we do...

kguske · Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 4638

What do you mean by temporary address?

persona_non_grata · Joined: Posts: 0

oh...well they use emails like persona_non_grata@
or tmp@
or spam@ (yes they actualy used that once,i banned him instantly)
And kguske....if you look close enough you can allways recognize them..
and i dont accept these things,why should i...

and another funny thing is,if i have my doubts about an address i refuse it and they dont even reply to the rejection...
so fair to say my approach works great... Laughing

Susann · Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 10:44 am

The daily emails to non existing adresses are really useless. But there is no function to check this automatically in nuke. Last week I found an article about this but couldn´t find it again but this is also interesting:

Only registered users can see links on this board!
Get registered or login to the forums!

I know its possible to add something to the php mail function.

I never had spam entries in my comments. So maybe our rules are good enough or I have banned the correct guys and bots too.

persona_non_grata · Joined: Posts: 0

but i mean addresses they use to register... Smile

Susann · Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 1:47 pm

I mean exactly those addresses Smile

persona_non_grata · Joined: Posts: 0

but i think you misunderstood...
im not talking about comments spam,but members who register and use bogus email addresses... Razz

Susann · Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 2:00 pm

No, I understood this correct. I ´m talking about users who try to register with non exiting email addresses or call it bogus email address just for fun ....

persona_non_grata · Joined: Posts: 0

wrong....lol....
i mean users that register with temporary addresses....
they do exist...but just during registration.... Sad

Susann · Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 2:16 pm

Registration through bots Rolling Eyes

edit: Sorryt I believe I know now what you mean.

kguske · Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 4638

Interesting article, Susann. Thanks for posting the link.

Guardian2003 · Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 10:41 pm

It would certainly be interesting if something could be written to 'wipe the slate clean' for a specific user.
I'm not sure the forum react to this, I think there may be a problem in the sequence i.e. you have to delete the posts before you delete the user but comment spamming is a real pain.
I have been meaing to add somthing to the Feedback module too so that the IP/Useragents are cpatured and sent with the mail to make blocking them easier too.

evaders99 · Moderator Joined: Apr 30, 2004 Posts: 2758

Interesting, that's a great article and idea

montego · Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 5:52 am

We somehow got on the topic of registration. I thought registration would require a valid email address for the activation link to be sent to. So, in essence, the entire address is valid...

Not sure how to stop that really except through a series of captchas, but even those may not be full proof from what I am reading (maybe they are good enough?).

Guardian2003 · Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 6:25 am

Thats a good point Montego but to expand a little, the technique raised in that article would certainly be good to incorporate within area's that might not always have a 'registered user' access permission such as the Feedback and Recommend Us modules.

Guardian2003 · Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2006 10:33 am

I have not yet found a foolproof way of checking valid email addresses - there are some sites you can register on which allow you to create 'temporary' email addresses and for obvious reasons, these a *real* addresses. Users of these sites can log into their free account and get their mail.

These temporary email accounts are ideal for those individuals who are up to mischief as they can register any email activated account they want, such as nuke sites with complete impunity and without fear of it being traced back to them.

I have just started collating a list of these for my Spam Blocker module so if he webmaster wants to, he can add the list to the forums table that holds the 'banned emails' list.

kguske · Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 4638

I look at it as a way to force them to do more work than I. Checking if the account exists forces spammers to at least create the account. In combination with blocked email domains, that will cut down on the majority of comment spam...

Guardian2003 · Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2006 11:21 am

Indeed, the more work they have to do, the less likely they are to do it.
I'm doing some work on the next version of my module so I'll see if I can somehow hook that check in somewhere.
I don't want to butcher too much core code or at least keep core code changes to an absolute minimum so I'm thinking maybe make a Class file to do the grunt work and it can then be re-used wherever its needed such as registration, feedback, recommend us,contact us, comments etc.

fkelly · Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2006 8:03 pm

Just as a quick response re. comment spam, I had someone register a few weeks back with a kind of suspicious email address (@infoporn.com) but I didn't pay it any heed. Then I was going thru logs and saw a bunch of stuff with "comments" in it and I went back in the stories archive and sure enough this low life was adding spam comments to 6 to 9 month old stories. Not the kind of thing that anyone would notice immediately but he was adding like 9 spam items to each story. Well of course I deleted his user id and went back and found all the IP addresses he was using and banned those too. Then I started deleting his comments. Well that takes forever so I used PHPmyadmin to find his comments in the comments table and deleted them. Well of course the articles table contains a number of comments field (I'm raving here and not necessarily giving accurate table and field names). So after the comments are deleted the number of comments will still show up inaccurately in the stories archive.

It's simple SQL to correct this and I'll get to it some day but of course it's a p.i.t.a. And as I think was suggested earlier we need at the least an administrative function to delete all comments by a given user while decrementing the count. And an additional goodie would be to have a setting like "no comments on news articles after xx days" and let you set it administratively. I guess that's for RN 3.0. Smile

Guardian2003 · Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2006 11:56 pm

... or you could of used my Comments Module that allows you to see the last 50 News and Reviews posted (regardles of the News or Reviews original post date) and done the removal from there as it adjusts the post count as it goes Wink

montego · Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2006 7:11 am

I would have to say this is a nifty little module! Thanks Guardian!

fkelly · Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2006 8:19 am

And where would I find that module, cause it sure would be helpful.

Guardian2003 · Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2006 8:57 am

Only registered users can see links on this board!
Get registered or login to the forums!

Sorry, you'll need to register - you might find our monthly newsletter handy so make sure you subscribe!