M42club.com - Home of the BMW E30/E36 318i/iS

GENERAL => Site and club discussion => Topic started by: colin86325 on January 21, 2010, 09:07:21 PM

Title: ATTN Admins: Fighting the spammers
Post by: colin86325 on January 21, 2010, 09:07:21 PM

M42Club is plagued with spammers, and the reason is probably because of a software package called XRumer. It allows a user to spam thousands of forums/subforums with little effort. It can defeat captcha registration that is sometimes used to register new forum users. IP banning isn't very effective because the software uses a database of proxies.

I suggest that M42club modify the user registration form as described in this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer

Over on S14.net we've been getting some of the same type of forum spamming and I suggested that the admins try to contact the software author and get their site blacklisted (that is, removed from the spam database).  Towards the end of this interview with the author, he indicates that such a thing is possible:  
http://xrumer-palladium.blogspot.com/2009/03/interview-with-xrumer-author.html

Unfortunately the Xrumer site has no contact info, but I think this site could honor a blacklist request, or put you in contact with the XRumer author:
http://www.botmasternet.com/contacts/

Cheers,
Colin

Title: ATTN Admins: Fighting the spammers
Post by: colin86325 on January 25, 2010, 09:31:09 AM

Is this site even moderated?

The spammers are running amock.

Title: ATTN Admins: Fighting the spammers
Post by: DesktopDave on January 25, 2010, 09:42:56 AM

It is.  They're pretty good at removing spammers.  I'll have to check your links out later, damn spammers.

Title: ATTN Admins: Fighting the spammers
Post by: dwtaylorpdx on January 25, 2010, 11:17:05 AM

I wonder what the difference is between this and 318ti.org? We don't get near as much spammer activity on it.

Dave

Title: ATTN Admins: Fighting the spammers
Post by: bimmerd00d on January 25, 2010, 01:54:48 PM

did M42club require a CAPTCHA during registration?  I forgot.

Title: ATTN Admins: Fighting the spammers
Post by: colin86325 on January 25, 2010, 05:08:43 PM

Quote from: bimmerd00d;85605

did M42club require a CAPTCHA during registration?  I forgot.

I believe it does.  However, the Xrumer software has a pretty sophisticated means of cracking/defeating captchas.
The best way seems to be to modify the registration form to include false password fields, as described in the Wikipedia article I linked.

Title: ATTN Admins: Fighting the spammers
Post by: LeeThompson on February 02, 2010, 04:17:40 PM

The last time an Admin was on her was in 10/06/09 give or take a few days.