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Sells PC To Pay For Divorce Joined: Posts: 5661

ok a few words...

as a friend has this 2 times last week and myself 3 signups its obvious spammers are investigating new ways to dump trash on your doorstep.
i cant tell what to look for when they register,but ive been keeping an eye on them for a long time now.

a few things you should know.

they found a weak part of the nuke site.
old news items and old forum topics...
the majority clicks the stop watching this topic link,and same goes with the news item reply..
if they look up an old news item and reply to it the chances are it will never be discovered.

thats how they managed to spam a bunch of sites...
i notified them all and they thanked me also..(thats nice Smile

)

If there are easy ways to prevent this i dont know.
If you run a support site then its harder,then when you run a regular site.
With the support site its harder to take away publishing rights from a new member,but the regular site can do that .. Smile

But if anyone has more ideas that might help others then feel free to post...

Posted: Sat Oct 07, 2006 8:01 pm

Yes I have noticed this too. Would be nice to remove comment replies in news after a set number of days.
Not sure if that would work for forums as sometimes a topic might be buried for a year before someone else adds to the thread. I rely quite heavily on the post getting bumpbed when there is a new reply and always read new responses - not sure that is practicle on very busy sites though Sad

registered · Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 8:50 am

Yeah, been thinking about this too. Maybe there is a need for a new administration module which is used to review ALL recent activity. MediaWiki has this and is quite useful. The admin could review this every day or so. Maybe then there could also be mass delete options.

I realize that this is not the "prevention" side of things, but maybe it would help admins keep tabs on things and then help them in the clean-up so that they do not have to figure out how to get it right through phpMyAdmin.

Just a thought.

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 9:12 am

nice approach montego....

but because they hit the news items mostly it could be smart to close that somehow...

is the reply of a member to a news item valuable ?
i dont think so...
a nice mod the counts his input into the site could solve that..

and im sure keeping track of sudden old replies or edits to the forum should be possible as well...

registered · Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 6437

Maybe a utility that counts the number of links in comments would be useful. A spam identifier?

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 10:32 am

mmm,yes...wordpress uses that...
looking at all of this and ideas it gives you the idea nuke is a bit behind on the development with stuff like this... Sad

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 12:46 pm

Ah, these are great ideas. Guardian is the "Spam Stopper" King so maybe he can cook something up. Maybe something which keeps track of the number of comments, runs periodically, and notifies the admin when there is a large jump in the count...

Of course, if you are like my site and have only 1 comment, even 1 added comment will look large! ROTFL

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 1:18 pm

well as we dutch like to say....its the silent and litle ones that makes the difference..

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 1:36 pm

I've already modded the comments file so that security image is displayed and required along with the Reviews comments but this is only stopping the bots, not real live people who have nothing better to do with their time.

I quite like the idea of 'link counting' within the 'submission' but someone somewhere will no doubt want to post legitimate links in comments. Vin had a nice approach for this and that was to render the links useless as they were only displayed as plain text not hyperlinks but even then, it is not the sort of thing most would want in their comments regardless of whether the link was 'clickable' or not.

Responses to 'old' news is always suspicious - lets be honest, no one digs through old news articles so that is defintely worth looking into.
Any more idea's?

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 1:43 pm

what if comments are written/displayed on an image?

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 2:09 pm

montego wrote:

Ah, these are great ideas. Guardian is the "Spam Stopper" King so maybe he can cook something up. Maybe something which keeps track of the number of comments, runs periodically, and notifies the admin when there is a large jump in the count...

Of course, if you are like my site and have only 1 comment, even 1 added comment will look large! ROTFL

Spam Stopper would stop a lot of that if the incoming referer or IP was already blacklisted but yes, some functionality like that would be useful, especially for older where the news is not on the front page.
I'll certainly look into that sometime within the next week.

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 11:32 pm

hitwalker wrote:

what if comments are written/displayed on an image?

Thats an interesting idea!

Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2006 8:34 pm

Would the spammers really be that smart? They would probably just assume a normal PHP-Nuke installation and let 'er rip with the auto bot.