Capitol Hill Blue Forums Forum News & Information Forum News/Questions/Concerns, etc. Spam bot tsunami

Due to excessive spam bot traffic to the registration portal I am forced to temporarily suspend new member registrations via the home page.

Instead, if anyone you know wants to join the Rant, ask them to email me personally at
dfspamboxfb (at) gmail (dot) com
with "RANT" in the subject line, and I will manually add them as a member instead.

When I first took over as admin 319 spam bots were queued up to register and it took a lot of elbow grease to get rid of them.
In the ensuing months it has never dropped below twenty bots per day.

I can't keep up, so adding new members manually seems to be the way to go until better anti-spam software solutions can be added.

Ok.

Thanks for saving us, Jeff. I'm so glad that somebody is keeping this island of sanity intact.

I suppose we need some fairly comprehensive Turing Test for this, which will not be too much of a hassle for one-time registration.

Can't we include one of those test to determine if the registrant is a bot?

It does...the UBB portal includes a step where the applicant has to re-verify just as everyone else did when they first came here.
I have had well over a thousand "Message could not be delivered to sender" notices in my mail account that I use with the Rant.
They're in the RANT folder, of course, or they are until I delete them.

The bots these days are much smarter than our old software, it seems.
They can spoof real names, email addresses, you name it.

We tried using that "CAPTCHA" feature before, I've never resurrected it yet because it caused some problems when we tried using it.
I might try seeing if I can make the CAPTCHA work.

My IP ban list is a mile long, soooo many IP addresses.
That's pretty much the only bulwark against the bots because once you ban their IP they need another one, etc.
Heh, not much of a bulwark, as I suspect it only takes a nanosecond for a bot to pick a new IP address.
And yes, the OVERWHELMING majority of the bots ARE from Russian ISP's.

RU
PL
CZ

Those are three top countries that spam the Rant trying to get in.

CAPTCHA hasn't been worth a s*** in months. Bots are far more sophisticated now.

If you look at the email address of the account waiting for registration, look for periods in weird places, and user names that look normal but have hashed emails.

There is no way to automate this at the moment.

Oh, I enlisted a better solution, that of just doing invites personally. I decided that because out of all those original entries, exactly ZERO were legit.
Same goes for all the hundreds that attempted to register SINCE I first posted about this issue.

Of course, I encourage every member to try and recruit, too.
My email address is "dfspamboxfb (at) gmail (dot) com" and all they have to do is put "The Rant" in the SUBJECT line.
If they come with a reference from any other Ranter, they're in immediately, as I will add them manually.

This is how we keep the trolls to a minimum.

Over at PD, we get 10 registrations a day, and maybe one actual person a month.

If a guy named Cain Aerte signs up, let him in. He's the most knowledgeable person on dealing with spam that I know.

What we need desperately is an email you can send to a spambot that destroys it's computer. Or maybe it adds to a count, so when 100 of those are received it locks out that IP address. In the early days of the internet, there was "Internet Death" imposed against anybody violating the protocols so they couldn't flood the net with garbage. Every router would compare IP addresses and refuse to pass on anything on the death list. Maybe we need that revived.

All great thoughts but let's look at the numbers here.
CHBRR had, at one time, up to six thousand members but a cursory glance at the roster's post counts reveals that we had at most a thousand ACTIVE members, maybe 1100.

Getting eleven hundred new active members here could be accomplished in two years if we all recruited actively at least once a day.
But to be honest, we'd be peachy keen and happy with just another three or four hundred active members.

So, we don't actually need any sophisticated software, all we need is folks to spread the word and send prospects to me, or a "generic me", an administrator who will vett the prospects and add them manually.

Hell, for that matter, even another HUNDRED enthusiastic new Ranters would skyrocket this place in a very good way.

So send me what you have and what you can find.
If any of you are recommending them that's good enough for me and I will just add them immediately based on your say-so's.
That goes for ANYONE here who is currently active.

Just send them to ole Checkers.