ATTN Admins: Fighting the spammers

[colin86325]

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

[colin86325]

Is this site even moderated?

The spammers are running amock.

[DesktopDave]

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

[dwtaylorpdx]

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

Dave

[bimmerd00d]

did M42club require a CAPTCHA during registration?  I forgot.

[colin86325]

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.

[LeeThompson]

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