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Massive Spam Signups -- How to Stop

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Massive Spam Signups -- How to Stop
On my Gossamer Forum, I am getting massive spam signups from domains like sohu.com, 163.com, tom.com, qq.com and others. In the last three days alone, about 50 of these.

Now, I have my signup procedure set for manual confirmation by me (the moderator.) So they've done the login procedure and then responded to the validation email. They aren't getting into my forum because I'm manually filtering all of these out.

I'd like to find a way to modify Gossamer Forum to block these 'bots (or whatever they are) from doing this automatically. What can be done?

Many Thanks in Advance,
Mark
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Re: [Mark Coniglio] Massive Spam Signups -- How to Stop In reply to
Hi,

Are you wanting to just reject those emails from signing up, or something else?

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk
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Re: [Andy] Massive Spam Signups -- How to Stop In reply to
Well, something that made it more difficult to get past the signup stage -- like a CAPTCHA, i.e., a question like "What is (1+ two) * 3?"

But it looks like rejecting certain domain names would also be an option.

Thanks, Mark

Last edited by:

Mark Coniglio: Sep 4, 2011, 11:46 PM
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Re: [Mark Coniglio] Massive Spam Signups -- How to Stop In reply to
Hi,

I wrote something like that for Gossamer Links, but unfortunatly when I tried to port it over into GForum, I couldn't find the correct "hooks" that were needed to authenticate the values passed in.

By all means, it could be done by "hacking" the main code - but then that would mean it has to be re-done whenever an upgrade is made to GForum

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk
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Re: [Mark Coniglio] Massive Spam Signups -- How to Stop In reply to
Hi Mark,
contact GT and ask for gforum 2.0.
You are looking for a feature, that a forum software need to have these days.

Matthias
gpaed.de
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Re: [Matthias70] Massive Spam Signups -- How to Stop In reply to
Does Gossamer Forum 2.0 exist already?
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Re: [Mark Coniglio] Massive Spam Signups -- How to Stop In reply to
Hi,

Unfortunatly it doesn't yet (if you ask nicely though, they may let you have a pre-beta copy of it - but be warned, there are still a few bugs that need fixing up)

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk
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Re: [Andy] Massive Spam Signups -- How to Stop In reply to
Andy wrote:
Hi,

Unfortunatly it doesn't yet (if you ask nicely though, they may let you have a pre-beta copy of it - but be warned, there are still a few bugs that need fixing up)

Cheers

GT had a lot of time the last THREE years to fix these errors. I don't know what's going on with GT?
Seems, that they just stopped the update, just before it was ready...

Matthias
gpaed.de
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Re: [Andy] Massive Spam Signups -- How to Stop In reply to
So I have added the IP addresses and domains shown at the bottom of my email to my "Bans" list. (Note the IP addresses are the resolved versions of the domains.) But it doesn't stop people from signing up. I still get them listed in the "Validate" section of the Users tab.

What to do? they're doing like 30 or 40 of these a day!

One thought: could they be bypassing the signup page entirely by feeding the request in via the default URL that would process the signup request? Is that possible?

Best Wishes,
Mark

sohu.com
61.135.181.175
tom.com
202.108.12.62
hotmail.com
65.55.72.167
163.com
220.181.8.90
21cn.com
58.211.81.104
qq.com
125.39.127.25
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Re: [Mark Coniglio] Massive Spam Signups -- How to Stop In reply to
Hi,

One thing you could try, is CloudFlare:

https://www.cloudflare.com/login.html

I use it on one of my blogs to stop people from spamming the comments (was getting about 100 spam a day). It will weed out IP's that are reported as spammers. It also has a "challenge page", which is a CAPTCHA page for someone who looks dodgy, so you have to confirm who you are. All it really requires you to do, is change your nameservers over to them - and setup your custom DNS records (takes about 10-15 mins to setup)

For the emails - have you looked at setting up Setup > Users> banned_email ? I think that should do what you need.

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk
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Re: [Andy] Massive Spam Signups -- How to Stop In reply to
Thanks -- I added the domains to the "Banned Email" and that seemed to do the trick. We'll see if it stops the spam. I'll investigate your other solution as well.

Best Wishes,
Mark