1. Troutnut Forum
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2. Fly Fishing
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3. New posts should be working again. Hopefully fixed the spam.

The Chinese spammers struck again this morning, and it was clear that my original, simple method for stopping them (banning narrow IP ranges) wasn't going to work. Today I spent some time breaking out one of the bigger guns in my arsenal, which should make it much more difficult for them to automate their posting of hundreds of spam topics at a time. Hopefully that puts an end to them.

I will solve this problem one way or another, hopefully without affecting the experience of normal forum users at all. I have plenty of other tricks up my sleeve if this one doesn't work.

Jason, sounds like you need to get in on the "Cyberwar" - have some hacker-slacker build you a nice, ugly, untraceable virus to hit them back with. These people only understand and respect force, after all...trash them back a few times and they will look elsewhere for easier prey.

Jonathon

That kind of thing only happens in the movies. ;) I would love to be able to track the little bastards down and amputate their hands one paper cut at a time, but it's not really possible.



Nah, they understand and respect profits. Spamming is a game of very high volume. To make money, they have to spam hundreds (or more) of sites with hundreds of posts each. They use scripts to automate the process, and the scripts are usually generic, designed to work for thousands of different sites. It's not worth the time to write a custom script for any given site, and they probably don't have the programming talent to do that anyway. I think once I thwart the script they're using to post spam automatically, they'll just drop this site from their list (or keep trying to post with the script that doesn't actually do anything). I don't know how their script works, but I have a good hunch, and if I'm right then my current fix will keep them away for good.

Well, that solution didn't work. And now they're spamming with replies instead of new topics, which is quite a bit more annoying to repair.

I've added yet another layer of defenses, and I think this one will work pretty well.

Okay, I've got a system in place now that will probably put an end to these spammings for good, and it shouldn't affect any legitimate users in any countries.