I can remember UseNet when it was a viable communications tool much like today's forums. It was destroyed by spamming that started with a couple of lawyers in Arizona who dreamed up the idea of "Free" advertising. It not them somebody else would have figured it out sooner or later.

There were methods of spam reduction, in particular a guy in Oklahoma who acted like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. He eventually burned out. I was one of his unpaid helpers.

The real culprit was the indifference of those who hosted UseNet servers. That and way too many techs who were too busy with their own deals.

As email spam activity gets less, and it is with filters getting more and more sophisticated, and legal deals that do not cover forum spam, spammers have been turning more and more to the tens of thousands of forums, chat rooms, and even guest books to do their thing.

Since 2008, the site www.stopforumspam.com has been proactive in storing spammer IP and email addresses. Since 2008. . .and the list is almost two million strong.

Their current project is something called a "hostile networks list." This is going to be a long post anyway, so I will tell the story.

Indians are getting active in spam activities. Cheap, English speaking labor, is used to get around captcha and email verification techniques. We have thrown three out in the past week or so. They post junk and have a signature that leads to some site or the other. As an example, one led to a site www.mrage-license - site name distorted on purpose.

That site is an email harvesting site. Digging around on the site, you can find a disclaimer about what they do with the emails they harvest when people click to find out about licensing information in their states.

While they are on the site, the Indians harvest any email address they can see, including admin addresses and those who have their email in their signature. Yea, that one is illegal.

When we detect a spammer, we copy their posts, ban their IP and email addresses, then list what we found on SFS. Yes it takes time. More on this down the page.

Then we turn them in to the abuse@ address for their ISP and the same with whoever is hosting the site they are trying to advertise. Yes it take time. More on this down the page.

Rackspace, a major hosting operation, after nagging them including an email to their executive offices, finally said they would do nothing because with the disclaimer, there was no violation of their AUP. Beltch. . .

To which I replied, "So, if I understand what you are saying, you are willing to host sites that violate the AUP of other sites, so long as they do not violate yours?' In other words, one of their customers advertises its site by spamming, and Rackspace does nothing. Eventually, we will "Get" Rack space through the introduction of the "Hostile Network list."

If someone wants the procedure list I created so some of our other admins could help, I will post it here. It includes what to say and how to say it.

The issue I have is twofold.

How many of you help by taking the three steps to rat out a spammer? Yea I suspect all will ban them, but how many turn the IP and email addresses in to SFS, then abuse@ for both the ISP of the spammer and hosting company for the advertised site?

Frankly, if you don't, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Apathy and/or not enough time in a day killed UseNet.

Secondly, what is the prognosis for a plug in between UBB and SFS? That would save a bunch of time, which is the reality of why more admins don't do all they can to help stop spam.

Perhaps there is one and I am just unaware of it. Perhaps there is one upcoming in V8, which will certainly speed up our adoption of that upgrade.

If you take the time to read through SFS, you will find stuff like Munge and TOR networks and other things that I understand maybe 25% of, like htaccess?.

And all of it is based on somebody out there reporting attacks. You can bet I am going to try to understand all of what they are talking about because we might be next.

It is gonna get worse. Been there, got the tee-short that says, "UseNet, RIP."

Larry
www.marriageadvocates.com

When I approve new registrations, I manually run every IP address through SFS. When a spammer gets through the registration process, I report them on SFS. I do not report them to their ISP.

If anyone replies to my post, just for giggles, could you please tell us how many spammers you are dealing with a week.

We are averaging three or four.

Larry
www.marriageadvocates.com

I'll say less than one per month. I go through about 100 new registrations per week.

I don't have hard numbers, though.

I am impressed with your registrations. You do more in a week that we do in a month at this point in our growth. Yet we are getting more than our fair share of spammers - 7 in the past 10 days.

Larry

I manually approve registrations. (7-10 a day)

If I don't like the look of their occupation field, display name or email address - they go in the bin. I have had maybe 2 or 3 people contact me (in ten years) wondering why they weren't approved.

The result is only a handful of spammers in my forums entire history.

I used to get a lot of new registrations posting unofficial ads or sneaking links in to tutorials. The good thing about it was they were all from China and India so I just completely blocked IP addresses from those areas. Needless to say that this practice has more or less completely stopped now because of this.

I don't get any abstract spam at all though and never have.

I only got an increase in spam when I first opened facebook and twitter links... I only have about 4500 people registered on my boards and out of those only like 20 actually post consistently...so I am not a real busy board like some of you...but my boards are specifically for one group of people to keep in contact with each other and not really much more... so my needs/wants etc. are different.. not really attractive to spammers

Dunny

I don't think spammers differentiate between board types.

I have seen totally dead forums apammed into oblivion.

An example... I used to visit a support site (modded there for a while).

Admin installed new software but got distracted and now the site is unusable -- 19422 posts like this... знакомства в петрозаводске и карелии. Well, that and a considerable amount of postings relating to more 'unsavoury' topics

I counted 11 forum software programs that someone has written a plug in for that automates reporting to SFS.

Bunch of other stuff there that looks useful as well, on the resources - mods and plugins page.

As information, the Indian group is just now rolling out their product, which we have learned is a cut rate SEO enhancement deal and their main purpose is to somehow drops links into sites.

Larry