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Spam pm


MrsM

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40 minutes ago, john6767 said:

I too just reported this, you get the message before you get to the forum.

Yes, and all reports are of course appreciated. I simply hoped to discourage any more members from reporting these messages.

 

For the moment at least, the backlog has now been cleared!

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1 minute ago, Rob-M said:

@Athy No answer yet to how a new member was able to use the PM system, was there a hack or a relaxing of the PM rules?

 

 

No, there isn't. It's very unusual, and I too would be interested to know.

No relaxation of the rules as far as I'm aware.

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6 minutes ago, jeanb said:

I received one too. Thanks mods for sorting this SPAM.

It keeps us out of mischief.

We've received over 100 reports now, so the sender(s) meant business.

I haven't received one, not sure how they picked their targets. It has been a mixture of currently active members and people we haven't heard from for ages (eight years in one case).

Edited by Athy
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26 minutes ago, Athy said:

It keeps us out of mischief.

We've received over 100 reports now, so the sender(s) meant business.

I haven't received one, not sure how they picked their targets. It has been a mixture of currently active members and people we haven't heard from for ages (eight years in one case).

Which probably means there are more former/inactive forum members who aren't aware that they have been spammed.

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2 minutes ago, David Mack said:

Which probably means there are more former/inactive forum members who aren't aware that they have been spammed.

Yes, we could be hearing from them for weeks to come.

Oh, frabjous day.

Edited by Athy
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I deal with the new members for another forum and we use Cleantalk to block this sort of thing now which seems to catch nearly all spammers before they join.   There is very little cost involved to use it.   Presumably the forum has something similar?

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56 minutes ago, Athy said:

Yes, we could be hearing from them for weeks to come.

Oh, frabjous day.

 

As a former admin on a discussion forum I can say from experience that when spammers have targeted you once, they'll keep coming back. In the end my forum was being completely overwhelmed with spam and something drastic had to be done. I ended up installing an anti-spam addon to the forum software (whose name completely escapes me, sorry. Ah, it might have been Stop Forum Spam, or something like that). This automatically blocked known spammer email addresses by querying an external spam report database. This helped enormously but the thing that stopped it completely was blocking IP address ranges for whole countries - China, Russia, Africa where the main culprits. Good luck, but whoever runs/owns the forum, doing nothing is now almost certainly not an option.

 

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4 minutes ago, Jackofalltrades said:

 

As a former admin on a discussion forum I can say from experience that when spammers have targeted you once, they'll keep coming back. In the end my forum was being completely overwhelmed with spam and something drastic had to be done. I ended up installing an anti-spam addon to the forum software (whose name completely escapes me, sorry. Ah, it might have been Stop Forum Spam, or something like that). This automatically blocked known spammer email addresses by querying an external spam report database. This helped enormously but the thing that stopped it completely was blocking IP address ranges for whole countries - China, Russia, Africa where the main culprits. Good luck, but whoever runs/owns the forum, doing nothing is now almost certainly not an option.

 

Thank you for that advice, which I'm sure our Site Owner will heed.

I must say that, when we have had outbreaks of these posts on the actual forum, and when we've banned the senders, they have rarely, if ever, come back to bother us. I also wonder why many members have received these posts, but many others have not.

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6 minutes ago, Athy said:

Thank you for that advice, which I'm sure our Site Owner will heed.

I must say that, when we have had outbreaks of these posts on the actual forum, and when we've banned the senders, they have rarely, if ever, come back to bother us. I also wonder why many members have received these posts, but many others have not.

Unless they have managed to automate it somehow it might just be a question of how long they spent sending the spam.

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1 minute ago, Jerra said:

Unless they have managed to automate it somehow it might just be a question of how long they spent sending the spam.

Possibly; but there seems to be no rhyme or reason behind who has received them. It doesn't appear to be alphabetically based, now to take into account length of membership or number of posts.

   I must admit that I have not closely analysed them all, as I do have other things to do!

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8 minutes ago, Athy said:

Thank you for that advice, which I'm sure our Site Owner will heed.

I must say that, when we have had outbreaks of these posts on the actual forum, and when we've banned the senders, they have rarely, if ever, come back to bother us. I also wonder why many members have received these posts, but many others have not.

Sometimes the spammers are human, sometimes they are automated bots. These operate on a massive scale. I assume there will be a log of registration attempts and sign in attempts? That's the first sign you'll have of being targeted.  Talking of which, there will be some logic to who was targeted. it just may not be immediately apparent.

Oh, and picking up on an earlier comment, beware of new accounts that never post comments. Some will be genuine but as you now know some of them will be sleeper accounts used by spammers - whether human or bots. I used to run a query on these accounts and send them an email inviting them to make a post or two otherwise their account would be deleted. Not saying that was the right thing to do but once you've been overrun by the swines you'll do what it takes to keep them out.

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1 minute ago, Jackofalltrades said:

beware of new accounts that never post comments. Some will be genuine but as you now know some of them will be sleeper accounts used by spammers

Actually, some of the reports we've received have come from just such people, so I guess they're genuine.

3 minutes ago, Jackofalltrades said:

 I assume there will be a log of registration attempts and sign in attempts?

I can't help you there; I've never heard of one.

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33 minutes ago, Jackofalltrades said:

 

As a former admin on a discussion forum I can say from experience that when spammers have targeted you once, they'll keep coming back. In the end my forum was being completely overwhelmed with spam and something drastic had to be done. I ended up installing an anti-spam addon to the forum software (whose name completely escapes me, sorry. Ah, it might have been Stop Forum Spam, or something like that). This automatically blocked known spammer email addresses by querying an external spam report database. This helped enormously but the thing that stopped it completely was blocking IP address ranges for whole countries - China, Russia, Africa where the main culprits. Good luck, but whoever runs/owns the forum, doing nothing is now almost certainly not an option.

 

I found Cleantalk much more effective than Stopforumspam which missed most of them.

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2 minutes ago, Athy said:

Actually, some of the reports we've received have come from just such people, so I guess they're genuine. Yes as I said, "Some will be genuine".

 

I can't help you there; I've never heard of one.

I'm not familiar with the forum software used here. On vBulletin there are various logs. I'd be surprised if there aren't on this software.

 

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