Pete's QBASIC Site

Some asshole spammer posted about twenty topics for online casinos and texas hold'em poker this morning. He posted them through the "Submit QB News" link, so they would appear not only on the front page of my site but also on this forum by the user QB News.

Unfortunately, by flooding my news script with so many spam posts at once it corrupted the database that has all the information for just about all the dynamic areas of this site. I had to restore to my latest backup, from April 6th.

SO: If you have submitted anything since April 6th, it has been lost. Feel free to resubmit it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

It's lucky that I had that recent of a backup, or we could be in for some real trouble. I'm going to have to rethink how I handle the news submission on this site. I'm definitely not going to keep it "open to everyone" and "anonymous". I think I'll just make it so I have to approve stories before they're posted, much to my chagrin.

I fork hate spammers.

I hear ya there Pete. God damn spammers need to spam else where....even well itnentioned website like yours get it bad....all this because these ignorant morons think they'll be making money out of it. (probably been said they'd get some cash by spamming or something and they don't know any bettah....


On the other hand, because the presence is there and definitaly felt, there's no choice....but most of probably understand what this is all about.....

Wow, first that horrible mess with the front page of the forums, now this.

If they're stupid enough it might be the same person or people. I'll never understand the mentality of such fools. Oh well. Later.

Ya, spammers....no respect for QBers....

Well, that good you had a back up from april 6th....

That sucks,...

Why not make a automated buffer,.. Like either, only members can submit news,. who have to be approved.. then you don't have to filter every thing...

I could do that for QB News... but what about all the other categories? Files... Projects... FAQ Entries... QB Humor... "QB Philosophy"... all of them can be spammed.

I set them all up to allow for unregistered users to post. When you require registration on this type of site, nobody ever bother to submit anything. I hope it doesn't have to come to that.

Make it so guests can only post once every 30th second or so.

Wont get rid of the bots, but will make it harder to spam out topics...


If you feel like messing with PHP you could track posting activity, so when someone spams out many posts fast, you make it so they cant post anymore..

Spammed again... this is getting ridiculous. I've banned the spammer's IP address...but that probably won't change much.

As far as I can tell, this wasn't done by a bot, but by hand.

*Raises eyebrow* Somebody hate you Pete?

You have any enemies online?

Just approve certaian people that have proved themselves loyal to the qmunity to submit... that way crapholes cant!

No, cause then no one new couldn't start submitting stuff, and would discourage newcomers. All you can do Pete is just backup often and ban IPs.

Also I liked Z!re's suggestion.

a better although more dificult solution would be run all the posts though some kind of spam finger printing algo i.e. look for some key phrase's and words then asign wight values to them once the total weight value excides the trigger point the post is then simple gets trashed.

the hard part is preventing the filter from not throwing out good posts.

Possible solution: Make it where only registered people can post on the forum, this could exempt spam, on the other hand, new comers would have to register before posting. Allow any surfer to read posts, but reg. to actually post. This might not be what you want, but could take care of your spam problem or pin point spammer(s). If a user "MUST" reg. to post on the forum, then so be it.

I agree with having to register, but it is a put-off to those visitors who simply want to tell the site about something. A lot of spam stuff actually comes from bots, this I know from Yahoo! chat rooms and the like. A way around this is including a failsafe anti-bot feature when posting, such as a server generated image with a random set of letters and numbers. All posters will have to type this in EXACTLY as is. This way, visitors may need not register to post something. When it comes to your site overall, I'd personally have a "user must register" policy. But, it's your choice.

That's my 2 cents. Perhaps this should be elaborated with a bit more research and placed in an article for the mag? /egotrip

No, two articles a month is enough for now. BTW Pete, my interview with Jorden Chamid is complete. I'll send that off to you soon after I have proof-read it etc.

>anarky

arky, don't you understand? Pete said it was a human spammer. A Pic like that wont discourage a human spammer

yeah Pete u should put like a lock for Anonymous users, so they can just post like 2 posts per day ukno, so everyone could post a new but not spam , and also u can let the experts to post every 30 seconds or somethin like that..
lol as some1 said.. "my two cents"

Am I not allowed to be tired? Even I need sleep. I'm only human. :p

lol anarky.
I don't think her highnesses do though. QT-Pi seems to be either skizto or a queen learder of a hive. I son't think that 'they' need sleep.

Hey, mundofr! Yep keep those two-cents comming, I like that idea too.

Pete: you should do what anarky said though, in case if you do get bots. If you start getting human spammers, then just start banning IPs.

QT-Pi wrote:Possible solution: Make it where only registered people can post on the forum, this could exempt spam, on the other hand, new comers would have to register before posting. Allow any surfer to read posts, but reg. to actually post. This might not be what you want, but could take care of your spam problem or pin point spammer(s). If a user "MUST" reg. to post on the forum, then so be it.

Eh, we are on the main site: http://www.petesqbsite.com.

There is a news poster there, then that also activates the "QBNews" bot and it sends it here to.... Registering only to the forum wouldn't block it,. the QBNews bot is registered..

A thought...ban any posts with a texas holdem poker