What happened to the forum? > SPAM

[ergenomic]

What the hell is all this tripe that has appeared on the forum advertising garbage?

[Steven]

Spam indeed. I'm deleting them as we speak!

It's been a long time since we were flooded like this.
Anyway, users deleted, posts deleted and all IP's banned.

[ESPImperium]

Still starting to come thru.

Probably using a proxy and a bot to spam i think.

What about suspend all new registrations for a while???

[Dragonfly]

A good countermeasure IMO. Or at least put registration on approval but this will increase the workload of mods and admins.

[bettonracing]

Tomba,

Would it help if users reported the posts? E.g. Does the 'report' give You a direct link to the spam that saves You from searching for it?

Regards,

Kurt

[bhall]

Wow. It's almost, in a very weird way, impressive.

[wesley123]

Tomba,

Would it help if users reported the posts? E.g. Does the 'report' give You a direct link to the spam that saves You from searching for it?

Regards,

Kurt

Sure that will prevent it. I dont see how Tomba has to even search for it when the whole 'active topics' section is flooded with it.

Quite an annoying situation, I would say an fix would be to allow users to search to the homepage with an search engine, but not the forum.

[gridwalker]

Doesn't phpBB have a Captcha plugin? That would make flooding much harder and it should be relatively easy to install. It was an integrated feature of the CMS produced by my former employer, so I'd be really surprised if there isn't a package that could give the same protection to F1T.

[wesley123]

wouldnt work, based on usernames etc. these are just scripts, and lately scripts can go around Captcha quite easily, causing Captcha to become harder and harder and more different, as a matter of fact I for example have an huge problems reading the Captcha 9 out of 10 times and it seems it has a fault tollerance since a lot of times I am quite sure I was wrong, yet the captcha was correct.

Although it isnt my best friend I am for using a captcha script as well as blacklisting the http://www.f1technical.net/forum webpages. If it cannot be found it will not get flooded is what I think.

With the captcha I think when it is added all current members should be forced to fill it in once to verify themselves as an user. Apart from that, newly registered users also have to fill in a captcha to be allowed to post their first post. I am sure this will solve it.

[JackHammer]

How long has the F1 question been in the registration form?
Might be worth changing it or adding another

Something simple/stupid like "Copy and paste this text into the box" might do the job

[gridwalker]

wouldnt work, based on usernames etc. these are just scripts, and lately scripts can go around Captcha quite easily, causing Captcha to become harder and harder and more different, as a matter of fact I for example have an huge problems reading the Captcha 9 out of 10 times and it seems it has a fault tollerance since a lot of times I am quite sure I was wrong, yet the captcha was correct.

That is true in some cases, notably the most popular systems (such as reCaptcha) : this is because they primarily rely on images that can be analysed.

The system that we integrated into ocPortal was quite novel and innovative, in that it generated the captcha images using custom css injection, creating the captcha images on the fly within the browser without relying on easily analysed image formats. This made the captcha both easier to read and more secure against bots.

Admittedly, this would soon be circumvented if large numbers of people started relying on similar systems, but it certainly proved to be reliable during the 2 years that I was working for the company. Even if it wouldn't be a 100% secure fix, implementing captcha would still be an extra layer of security that could slow down the forum-flooding spammers.

[WhiteBlue]

This is a bit embarassing, isn't it? Looks like someone with experience of ambushing web sites got pissed off. I hope it gets resolved soon. The forum is unusable as it is.

[ackzsel]

Is it possible to disable posting for the first 24h or something after registration (assuming all these acounts are new)?

[xpensive]

This is a bit embarassing, isn't it? Looks like someone with experience of ambushing web sites got pissed off. I hope it gets resolved soon. The forum is unusable as it is.

A pissed off member perhaps?

[CMSMJ1]

same thing happened to another forum I use - loads of registrations and spamming at 0500 this morning.

it is a pain in the arse I'll bet!