Forum Index » Website & Forum Admin/Support » HELP! is there a moderator in the house?


Display Avatars Sort By:
Mary D
(hikinggranny) - MLife

Locale: Gateway to Columbia River Gorge
HELP! is there a moderator in the house? on 10/14/2012 21:34:23 MDT Print View

Massive spam attack! Poster "greenaonir aifsengh" now has 270 spam posts! I did send a PM to Roger but suspect that it's the wrong time of day to contact him. I don't know who else is a moderator here. I'm of course red-flagging when I run into a new one.

With the amount, this does sound more like a hacker attack....

Edited by hikinggranny on 10/14/2012 21:37:24 MDT.

John Ebner
(JEbner) - M

Locale: Big Thicket
re: spam on 10/14/2012 21:43:52 MDT Print View

Yeah, all in about 3 hours. Looks like a bot of some sort. If you look at the forum index and the last post made for each category almost everyone is made by this thing.

Edit: Now it's going by the name "SPAM". "SPAM" has 284 posts in 3 hours.

Edited by JEbner on 10/14/2012 21:48:29 MDT.

Mary D
(hikinggranny) - MLife

Locale: Gateway to Columbia River Gorge
HELP! is there a moderator in the house? on 10/14/2012 21:51:37 MDT Print View

The name change to SPAM means a moderator has finally stepped in to stop the incoming flow. I hope they'll delete at least the most recent posts--270 is an awful lot!

John Ebner
(JEbner) - M

Locale: Big Thicket
re: spam on 10/14/2012 21:55:06 MDT Print View

Initially I thought SPAM was a replacement for the other name since those were the newest ones on the index list but apparently they are both doing it simultaneously since they have both been at it for 3 hours.

Edited by JEbner on 10/14/2012 21:55:48 MDT.

Mary D
(hikinggranny) - MLife

Locale: Gateway to Columbia River Gorge
Response from Roger. on 10/14/2012 22:01:47 MDT Print View

I just got an answer from Roger to my PM--he has blocked the spammer and has asked Ryan for the ability to do a mass delete of everything by an individual poster. There's absolutely no way he can delete 270 individual posts, plus the considerable amount left from the previous attack 5 days ago!

John Ebner
(JEbner) - M

Locale: Big Thicket
Re: Response from Roger on 10/14/2012 22:10:59 MDT Print View

That would certainly make things easier. Thank you, Mary, for your effort in this matter.

Edited by JEbner on 10/14/2012 22:11:41 MDT.

Harald Hope
(hhope)

Locale: East Bay
not a hacker on 10/15/2012 14:34:51 MDT Print View

The guy is not a hacker, he's doing his job, which is to generate posts with links on high quality sites lik bpl, if possible. He uses software to do that, there's no hacking involved. You can buy it too, it costs about 600 bucks retail. He makes his living doing this, it's his job, just as you make your living doing whatever it is you do to earn a living. He'd use different user names if the forums were moderated better, but since bpl is letting him use the same one, that's even easier for him, he'll post stuff until that user name dies, then generate a new one, takes him no time.

That's a very good tool too by the way, good quality programming, assuming it's the one I think it is.

Nick G
(HermesUL) - F
Again... on 10/18/2012 14:51:05 MDT Print View

Looks like we've got another one.

Charles P
(mediauras) - F

Locale: Terra
Re: Again... on 10/20/2012 10:57:42 MDT Print View

maybe there should be a rule disallowing the posting of links for new accounts until you 10 forum posts or something. that would probably prevent these annoying spam attacks. there could be other more hi-tech solutions too. hopefully something can be figured out though, its frustrating!

Mike M
(mtwarden) - MLife

Locale: Montana
Re: Re: Again... on 10/20/2012 20:55:00 MDT Print View

^ agreed, many forums have that rule and it cuts the spam down siginificantly

Mary D
(hikinggranny) - MLife

Locale: Gateway to Columbia River Gorge
Re: Re: Re: Again... on 10/20/2012 21:07:26 MDT Print View

Another attack is happening now! I made a list of suggestions in the "Spam" thread in Chaff, if you can find it.

Why is this forum being hit when others aren't?

Possible reasons:
-Antique software
-Only one moderator
-Owner says no software changes
-Owner doesn't use the forum

I really feel sorry for poor Roger out there on the other side of the world, stuck with it all!

BER ---
(BER) - MLife

Locale: Wisconsin
Spamalot on 10/21/2012 09:01:16 MDT Print View

There is a certain ironic humor here...

Edited by BER on 10/21/2012 09:02:19 MDT.

Roger Caffin
(rcaffin) - BPL Staff - MLife

Locale: Wollemi & Kosciusko NPs, Europe
Re: Re: Re: Re: Again... on 10/21/2012 16:47:11 MDT Print View

Hi Mary

> Why is this forum being hit when others aren't?
Word is that many others ARE being hit. I guess 'BPL' was near the top of the new target list.

Cheers
http://www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/backpackinglight/forums/thread_display.html?forum_thread_id=69319
www.backpackinglight.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-15
44180
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:VE665K2VFWANCL2U5GNUBBMRT3MVBL4A
<urn:uuid:dbc6c2b0-258f-4534-b578-c5db817b62b6>
2014-04-20T08:48:37Z
209.137.236.253
sha1:PX2HU5MJ7SV2N55J2NAC7HQALCHZTVJK
<urn:uuid:1ac300f7-7de6-47ea-9f97-845401b7f4f7>
http://www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/backpackinglight/forums/thread_display.html?forum_thread_id=69319
response
<urn:uuid:390cda34-0af0-4b93-b179-e9213838d1b8>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-15
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for April 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf