The Forum registration will be locked from now on

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Giszmo
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The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by Giszmo »

Hi all

sorry but due to massive spamming on the forum we have to lock registration until we find a way to upgrade phpBB and the captcha.

Regards
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Giszmo
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Re: The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by Giszmo »

with a much harder captcha we hope to get the spam problem under control now. registration is open again.
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Re: The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by Kokolihapihvi »

"This forums registration is temporarily disabled while we handle spam issues. Sorry for any inconvenience."
So has the situation changed again or is this just an old announcement which should be removed?
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Re: The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by K776 »

I disabled it until we got to upgrade it. Despite the capcha being really hard, bots are getting through and spamming. I've had to take time cleaning out the posts/accounts.

The captcha is hard for even humans, so my guess is they are exploiting a bug.

However, someone re-enabled registration (/me looks at Giszmo). I've turned it off again until we can fix this thing.
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Re: The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by Giszmo »

:oops:
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Re: The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by Giszmo »

The worst spam issues are not really over. I just deleted 50 very recent - after the move to progval's server - spam posts and there seams to be no activity other than spam.
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Re: The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by ProgVal »

I recently installed a captcha on the wiki, and it seems to work for now.

On the forums, I just deleted a few spams and about 5000 inactive accounts. As spambots seems to be tweaked to match a specific configuration (otherwise they should not be able to decrypt the captcha), I modified some settings of the registration captcha, and wrote my own honeypot. We'll see if it works...

EDIT : Looking at the logs, I just noticed some admins delete topics and then users. I think the best way is to click the user name, then "Administrate", then select "Delete posts" in the "Delete user" area, and submit.
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Re: The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by Giszmo »

ProgVal wrote:EDIT : Looking at the logs, I just noticed some admins delete topics and then users. I think the best way is to click the user name, then "Administrate", then select "Delete posts" in the "Delete user" area, and submit.
Not sure if I'm the only one fighting this futile battle but it's a pain to see *no* legit posts at all.

I search for new posts (red threads) and open all the last posters in new windows.
If I see the person registered and did several posts within minutes, I directly go to administer user -> delete user -> delete posts -> yes, please do so -> close window.
If he posted only one post or took longer, I go search all posts -> back -> the above.

This is a pain to do and given the last ones registered just today I somehow doubt your counter-measures actually work.
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Re: The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by ProgVal »

Just noticed it... :(

I just enabled IP-checking against an anti-spam service. I don't like to depend on a third-party service, but it looks like it is the only way...
We'll see if it works.
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Re: The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by Giszmo »

ProgVal wrote:Just noticed it... :(

I just enabled IP-checking against an anti-spam service. I don't like to depend on a third-party service, but it looks like it is the only way...
We'll see if it works.
well, as long as the forum is dead as now, every manual effort to remove spam feels like a waste of time.

Besides, the statement of this thread does not hold true anymore. maybe we should update it.
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Re: The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by ProgVal »

Giszmo wrote:well, as long as the forum is dead as now, every manual effort to remove spam feels like a waste of time.
I will find a way to stop it.
Giszmo wrote:Besides, the statement of this thread does not hold true anymore. maybe we should update it.
Well, I did that as soon as I migrated the forum on my server.



EDIT :You may have noticed the forum was very slow this days, and it was because of MySQL. I could not find the origin of this problem util now: it was actually a table (phpbb3_styles_template_data) with 185044 records. I wiped it... and now everything is brazingly fast \o/
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Re: [old] The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by Giszmo »

I edited the thread name to look less frightening.

Ok, so what was that table good for if it only slowed down stuff?
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Re: [old] The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by ProgVal »

no idea

Hey, looks like there is no more spam!
EDIT: oh... actually you deleted them

I'm going to try a new config.

EDIT 2: After several unsuccessful attempts, I'm still trying new techniques again and again...
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Re: [old] The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by Giszmo »

:) So recently I did not delete anything. At least since this last post of yours. Are we good now?

Edit: Ok, in more than one week only one spammer? I just deleted one that posted today, so maybe it's bot-save now?
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Re: [old] The Forum registration will be locked from now on

Post by ProgVal »

I deleted about 50 accounts today
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