Laptop GPS World

Marvin Hlavac · #1 February 1st, 2008, 08:40 PM

toyfountain just let me know he received a PM (Private Message) from a member who just registered yesterday, asking him to join some social network that pays for advertising (or some silliness like that).

This morning I woke up just to find 5 or 6 pieces of spam posted in different sections of the forum by two other members who just joined yesterday. They posted long price lists of cell phones they sell.

Hmm, just imagine the amount of free time we would all gain if there were no spammers in the world

!

Please do let me know if anyone ever receives spam via PM from another member. The member will be immediately deleted from the list of members.

Marvin Hlavac · #2 March 5th, 2008, 06:26 AM

glenw just informed me he received spam by a brand new member (user name Patricia). I suspect he or she might have sent the same spam PM to other people, too.

I apologize for the inconvenience. I deleted him/her as a registered member.

I'm not sure if it is possible to prevent brand new members (with post count #0) to send PM and/or email to other members, but Iwill look into it. It could be a useful feature to prevent this type of spamming.

leaferz · #3 March 5th, 2008, 07:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Marvin Hlavac

toyfountain just let me know he received a PM (Private Message) from a member who just registered yesterday, asking him to join some social network that pays for advertising (or some silliness like that).

This morning I woke up just to find 5 or 6 pieces of spam posted in different sections of the forum by two other members who just joined yesterday. They posted long price lists of cell phones they sell.

Hmm, just imagine the amount of free time we would all gain if there were no spammers in the world

!

Please do let me know if anyone ever receives spam via PM from another member. The member will be immediately deleted from the list of members.

Hey Marvin I'm new here too LOL

What a waste of time for promoting that cheesy link

Jordan · #4 March 6th, 2008, 09:06 PM

Got a PM from Patricia about Budism and religion. Get a life Patricia

Marvin Hlavac · #5 March 6th, 2008, 10:01 PM

She's no longer a member here

Marvin Hlavac · #6 May 23rd, 2008, 08:26 PM

UPDATE: I've done some reading about the issue of spam over the last two days. I have to admit I was rather ignorant of how most of the forum spam is generated. I was under the impression that a person actually sits at his computer and posts spam messages one by one. Wrong! Vast majority of spam posted on forums is posted by robots. A bot registers a user name, and a bot posts all the junk to the forum, or even sends it to users via PM!

I have, over the last two days, implemented two different measures to deal with spam. Two spammers were already automatically prevented from registering earlier this morning, and one testing spam I just sent few moments ago, was automatically prevented from being posted.

I don't think this will prevent 100% of spam, but I hope that at least for the time being this should take care of most of the undesirable stuff.

Have a great, spam-free, weekend

!

Marvin Hlavac · #7 May 28th, 2008, 09:47 PM

In addition to the two anti-spam measures mentioned in the above post, I just added a third measure to combat forum spam.

This afternoon I installed an add-on to the forum software, which will automatically scan new posts from brand new members (with post count zero) for common spam keywords. If any are found, the post/thread will be sent to the moderation queue to prevent their spam from having any effect.

Since this web site was started at the beginning of October 2007, some 8 months ago, every week I have had to delete several pieces of spam postings. All 100% of them were posted to the forum by newly registered accounts with post count 0 (zero). I'm quite positive they all were posted automatically by bots. Spam is not going away, it is part of the Internet culture, unfortunately. All we can do is to try to stay a step ahead of most of the spammers by using available tools to prevent them from polluting our forums here at Laptop GPS World.

Again, this will only potentially affect brand new users who are posting for the very first time. After they successfully post once, the subsequent postings will no longer be scanned.

If a legitimate posting gets sent to the moderation queue, it will be posted as soon as it is personally reviewed. This may take from a few minutes to a few hours. I very much apologize for the inconvenience.

Marvin Hlavac · #8 July 21st, 2008, 05:34 PM

Laptop GPS World now has several filters in place to prevent spam bots from registering and spam messages from being posted to the forum. This has worked amazingly well over the past couple of months.

Spammers are creative, and I'm sure no filter will prevent them from spamming for too long. Eventually we will again see some of their creations even on our forum again. But so far so good...

It is good to see legal system doing something against spam, too.

30 Months Jail For NY Spammer

Quote:

A Brooklyn man was sentenced to 30 months in prison on Tuesday for sending spam e-mails to more than 1.2 million subscribers of America Online in a scheme that foiled the Internet company's spam-filtering system. Adam Vitale, 27, was sentenced in federal court in Manhattan after pleading guilty more than a year ago to breaking anti-spam laws. He was also ordered to pay $180,000 to AOL in restitution.

Ken in Regina · #9 July 21st, 2008, 06:41 PM

Marvin, it has been long enough since I registered that I can't recall the registration process. Do you have a CAPTCHA picture that the registering user must key in as part of the process to verify that they are really human and not a bot?

...ken...

Marvin Hlavac · #10 July 21st, 2008, 06:46 PM

Yes, CAPTCHA is there. I'm sure it helps a bit, but apparently some spam bots these days can deal with CAPTCHA, too

.

Ken in Regina · #11 July 21st, 2008, 06:53 PM

I suppose it didn't take someone too long to figure out that a variation of hand-writing recognition software would be able to get through a lot of it. I keep mine on the vanilla setting which is hard enough for many people to read. It probably needs to be on the setting that makes the characters really wild and wierd, but too many of the folks I'm interested in (including me!!) simply can't make them out well enough to get registered. It blocks people better than bots, apparently.

...ken...

Marvin Hlavac · #12 July 21st, 2008, 07:53 PM

Yes, I agree. I made CAPTCHA here easy to read for humans, as I myself have had difficult time on some websites on more than one occasion.

Marvin Hlavac · #13 July 23rd, 2008, 02:10 PM

Quote:

The "spam king" was sentenced on Tuesday to 47 months in prison, with a ruling that the court hopes sends a message to other online criminals.

Robert Soloway, the man known as the spam king for the massive volume of spam he sent out, pleaded guilty to fraud, spamming and tax evasion after being indicted in May 2007. After an unusually long sentencing hearing lasting two-and-a-half days, Judge Marsha Pechman handed down her sentence in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle.

The case has been closely watched because only a few such spam cases have ever been tried. A man named Jeremy Jaynes was sentenced in Virginia earlier this year to nine years in prison for his spam crimes, and Adam Vitale got slightly more than two years for a recent conviction in New York.

The whole story at http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...our_years.html

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Laptop GPS World

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