New Spammer Registration Block (Spammer Hall of Shame Mk II)

[Son of a Beach]

Following up from this topic, we have been getting an increasing number of human spammers registering and posting here (in addition to the thousands of automated spam bots that are generally unable to get past the registration spam check). Some of these spammers are very subtle and very difficult to pick, and even when they are obvious it's a tedious process of deleting the accounts, and sometimes putting in bans for those who sign up repeatedly. I'm very thankful that the moderators here put so much effort into keeping the forums fairly clear of spam, because there is a huge amount of attempts to post it here.

Anyhow, last week I implemented a small change to the registration process so that it now checks some of the new registration details against a known spammers database, and aborts the registration completely if it finds a good match. We have also been contributing data to that spammers database for several months now, when we do get spammers who successfully start posting here.

This new change logs details of all the spammers it blocks to this new page. So that page gets automatically updated every time a human spammer is automatically detected and blocked (no record is kept anywhere of the zillions of automated spam bots that get blocked every day).

As you can see, we've been blocking about 4 human spammer registration attempts every day since the the change was implemented, so it's doing a reasonably good job.

Please keep reporting spam to us for the inevitable instances when it does get through.

[ollster]

human spammers

Human? That's a rather generous description...

[Son of a Beach]

To true. I had to find some adjective to distinguish them from bots. Maybe "manual" spammers. Even that sounds too good.

[corvus]

To true. I had to find some adjective to distinguish them from bots. Maybe "manual" spammers. Even that sounds too good.

SoaB you could use "flipping" as my non profane speaking workmates did
corvus

[tasadam]

To give you an idea, here's a graph indicating my submissions to the spammers database - accounts from this forum that didn't get blocked but were definite spammers, that I added to the stop forum spam database and removed all trace from this forum.

spammers-YTD.jpg

EDIT
Just found this page - there sure must be a lot of spammers out there...
http://www.stopforumspam.com/contributors

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