An update on the spam situation

lanierb

Apparently cyclingforums will be redesigning the forums and upgrading its software in about a week. At that point they can put in some more effective anti-spam measures, but we will probably have to wait until then for a solution.

Lanier

surgtech1956

Its about time. It shouldn't have taken this long. Must be they finally decided to do something.

Julian G.

Redesigning the forums isn't gonna do much if we don't have moderators that actually do anything on here...

PaulMD

Good to hear something, but we had already 3 weeks full of spam. To install a few anti-spam tweaks takes an hour and making somebody moderator is 3 seconds? I am sorry but I have the feeling that the admins don't take us seriously anymore.

__________________
My latest power profile: 5SP: 16.3w/kg | 1MP: 7.7w/kg | 5MP 5.8w/kg | FTP 4.7w/kg
Cycling Forum.info

Sillyoldtwit

Hello!

__________________

kopride

Don't get rid of the spam now! I am still contemplating all the HOT SALES. The first 30 Hot Sale threads frankly annoyed me, I found the next 1500 threads to be obnoxious, but lately, I am thinking that if the sale is so "HOT" that this company just cannot stop trying to give me the benefits of such "Hotness," SHould I refuse? I mean after 5 steady years of ignoring substances guaranteed to make my penis 3 " longer, should I ignore this offer as well? I mean, If I ignore this one, I will just be a guy without a new pair of pumas, addidas, etc, and a penis 3" below my potential. And how will I meet my FTP goal of 300 without a dandy set of addidas after I get off the bike? If I purchase the penile enlargment products and buy new sneakers from these spammers, will dragging that enormous schlong up a hill affect my climbing ability, it can't help my wt/kg

Piotr

The enormous schlong won't help, but the cheerleading squad waiting for you on top should motivate you to get there ASAP.

__________________
blog

strader

I'm starting to think that maybe the owners of cyclingforums.com are in fact spammers, who spent years developing an online community of devoted readers, with the sole intent of one day releasing a spam fest to make millions of dollars on knock-off addidas, Nike, and male enhancement products.

Felt_Rider

Maybe the system administrator was killed by a spambot

Wasn't that on one of the Star Trek series
No, I remember those were the Borg

Piotr

I sure hope the administrative account hasn't been compromised, though I suspect the effects would be much worse if it were the case.

__________________
blog

AngryPenguin

I have experience dealing with these spambots on previous boards and with a little attention they are quite easy to get rid of.

As previously pointed out the majority of the posts come from a small number of users and there aren't actually that many new ones registering.

The best way is to ban the users and then ban their ip adresses as well, you might even find that some of them share the same ip adress as they come from the same server. If they attempt to recconnect with a different ip from the same server you can also ban whole ip adress ranges. 95% of the bots are too stupid to use a variable ip adress so this takes them out straight away.

The remaining bots then have to be banned and kept an eye on. The other alternatnive is to ensure that on registering the user has to perform some sort of random task that a bot cannot achive, a good example of this that can be easily coded is a series of pictures and asking the users to pick all of the people with hats... as long as there are a large enough number of source pictures and they move around the page it is quite a hard task to get a bot to learn to do it properly. The best way which is completely foolproof is to write a small program to reassign the picture names once a day and then the bots have no chance at all...

It just seems a shame that a previously nice busy community is being broken up by something that someone with experience in could fix in a copule of days. Also as a long term project more moderators need to be brought in from the community as the current nunber is much too small to deal with the volume of posts and traffic to the site. The few moderators that we have are restricted to very few forums which effectively means that they are crippled in their ability to deal with any problems like this across the whole site. Half a dozen active supermoderators would do you a world of good.

If people are volunteering for admins why not accept them on a trial basis for a probationary period and get on with sorting this mess out, bearing in mind that normal moderators cant usually (depending on the board settings) ban ip adresses. I would certianly volunteer as I have been a very appreciateve lurker over the last few years and can provide some references and stuff.

__________________
Its not what you've got its what you do with it.

Black_Hat

It would be best to POST the offending Ip addresses .......

Then we could return the favor ....

frenchyge

I do remember that Austin Powers was nearly killed by a Fembot. Maybe that's what you were thinking of.

Ric Stern Training is really one of the sponsors of this forum, which I believe is different from being the forum owners. IOW, I think Ric (among other sponsors) pays a portion of the costs required to run the forum but does not have a hand in the actual administration (except as a moderator for the discussions). My guess is that something has happened with the forum owners (gone out of business, someone quit, etc), and that nothing is really being done at that level any more. With the forum getting all crapped up with spam, the sponsors will probably look elsewhere at some point too.

PaulMD

Spambots run on fancy fast webservers or do run on people's windows XP computer that hasn't a good anti-virus scanner or spyware blocker. The only solution against spambots is 1.) make it difficult to sign up 2.) delete there accounts and ban the used emailaddresses and IPaddresses 3.) delete there posts.

__________________
My latest power profile: 5SP: 16.3w/kg | 1MP: 7.7w/kg | 5MP 5.8w/kg | FTP 4.7w/kg
Cycling Forum.info