Stopping spam

rec53 · Joined: 13 Oct 2005 Posts: 18 Location: Peterhouse

No, this is not a polite message asking people trying to spam this forum to stop.

I am about to add a slight mod which in theory should stop the guest spam posting. It shouldn't affect normal guest posting/normal posting, but if anyone has any problems, please tell me!

rec53 · Joined: 13 Oct 2005 Posts: 18 Location: Peterhouse

Yipeee!

It works, and I didn't just take down the entire board. It seems to take a little bit longer for the posting page to load, but it appears to work as intended.

Obviously we will have to see if our spammers agree (actually, there is no log being made, so in a way, we will never really know if we are successful)

rec53 · Joined: 13 Oct 2005 Posts: 18 Location: Peterhouse

OK, spam continues to arrive. Perhaps it didn't work!

If anyone has any ideas on how to allow non-registered users to post without allowing spam through, please tell me.

I'm thinking picture verification for each post, but haven't been able to find a suitable mod, and don't know enough to mod myself yet!

kerwin · Joined: 28 Aug 2005 Posts: 8

It is well-known (to appropriate people, espectially those in blogosphere) that adding picture verification won't eliminate spam posts.

The sure solution would be to lock the board, banning people who haven't got a crsid or posting inside cam domain (authorisation through raven?). Anyone using cam account to post any sort of rubbish should then be referred to IT Syndicate for misuse of CUDN resources (violation of rule #7, for instance).

rec53 · Joined: 13 Oct 2005 Posts: 18 Location: Peterhouse

I think I am being a bit of an idealist here.

Raven authorisation is certainly going to be used on this site at some point in the future, for the cam only part for example. It would be nice to keep the site open to guest posting though.

The current wave of spamming doesn't appear to be very aggressive, so my thoughts were that some picture verification would be enough to stop them. I did read somewhere about spam still getting past picture verification, but it would certainly limit it. I suppose that view explains why there isn't a great deal of talk about it, because it wouldn't work! (either that or my googling skills aren't what they used to be!)

There appears to have been no new spam for a couple of days, so perhaps the changes have stopped it, or at least slowed it down a lot. The eventual solution if it does continue will probably be a combination of Raven, cam-only, and a tight registration system for those outside Cambridge.

spam · Guest

spam ji ji ji
LOL