Spammers

[superevil7]

The number 8 suggestion, deleting members who don't post during a period of time...that one would remove many legitimate members.
A large majority of members are lurkers only, and they never post comments or stories. Not sure how much work would be involved in
monitoring members levels of activity.

As long as "Thanks" are taken into account, then I don't think it would be that big of a deal to do this. The entire forum is readable without an account, so I'm not sure who's making accounts not to leave comments or post stories anyway.

[Trundle]

Minimum should be disabling new users for a while.

Can already see two new spam accounts have registered in the last few hours and will be posting spam all over the forum asap.

[Darky]

I was sick past days, so I couldn’t delete messages. But I saw when no one did something it didn’t increase. So why don’t we all ignore it. Just let the forum go on. It wants attention and if we don’t give it, fun might be over

[Debbifan]

I was sick past days, so I couldn’t delete messages. But I saw when no one did something it didn’t increase. So why don’t we all ignore it. Just let the forum go on. It wants attention and if we don’t give it, fun might be over

Possibly there's something in that, since fairly soon after you did delete the messages from Wednesday, they are back again now. But I would still hope there might be a way of stopping them more definitively via registration, post qualification etc.

[Darky]

I agree, but unfortunately that’s not in my rights. So we need Viradae for that, and it’s their decision how to handle that.

[IdentityUnknown]

Maybe there’s a way to hide the spam messages without deleting them? So they think it’s still there but no one else sees it? Just a thought I figured I’d share.

[Buckaroo]

I haven't been reading all the posts about this problem, but how is he getting back in?

Spammer/Scammer
Joined:Fri Feb 14, 2025 4:16 pm. Last active:Fri Feb 14, 2025 4:44 pm

[DrWhoFanJ]

I took a break from the forum yesterday as I assumed there’d be reduced human interaction here on Valentine’s Day. I opened the site this morning to 33 notifications, only two of which were not spam bots. Something definitely needs doing about this infestation as soon as possible.

[KiTA]

I was sick past days, so I couldn’t delete messages. But I saw when no one did something it didn’t increase. So why don’t we all ignore it. Just let the forum go on. It wants attention and if we don’t give it, fun might be over

That's not how this works, they don't care or even know if their stuff is being seen. It's basically "free" for them to do this and if a single person clicks on the link, then they've made their "money" back.

I haven't been reading all the posts about this problem, but how is he getting back in?

Spammer/Scammer
Joined:Fri Feb 14, 2025 4:16 pm. Last active:Fri Feb 14, 2025 4:44 pm

The person doing it has a bunch of internet connections and bounces between them. Either they're paying for a VPN service, or more likely using a "botnet" of compromised computers and bouncing off them to do it. Either way, there's no easy way to tell that it's "him."

They have automated the account registration process for phpBB, the forum software the site uses, and thus they can just create new accounts. Probably near constantly. Also it may be more than one person doing it, for example there's the one posting as "Admin" or "Moderator" and there are other accounts that appear fishy in the new registration list.

On the forum I used to run we'd see hundreds of accounts created a month. This was for a small, mostly shut down, MC/ENF comic book translation team that maybe had 1 or 2 real messages posted a year. They were very obviously bots because they'd put gibberish in the MSN Messenger / Skype / ICQ / AIM fields, all social networks that have been dead for a good many years.

Looking over at McForum, you can see they have this very same telltale sign. https://imgur.com/a/7hO7qum

DamonPyday, for example, has a spam link in his Yahoo Messenger link. Manuelchera has his Y!M set to "I just work here." FreepornGom links to a porn site. Thomasnoush has the gibberish that his Russian language spam turns into because YABBSE, the software mcforum runs on, doesn't support Unicode.

But even then, there are 30 new users in like 2 days in that screenshot. The site is simply not that popular, not after the death of ASSTR and the open internet slowly dying. Looking at page two you even see multiple users referencing "XRumer23 StrongAI." This leads us to this wikipedia link for them talking about what XRumer is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer

It's AI enabled forum spam software. So that's what's hitting mcforum. There are discussions on countermeasures over there.

I can't see that field over here in our member list, but I can see that there are now 4 "Admin" accounts created yesterday evening all around the same time, and 1 "Moderator" account. Only 2 of the "Admin" accounts have been activated, the other two are not posting spam yet. But they will.

The countermeasures I'd suggest are:

Enable some form of questions/answer based thing during the sign up process. Add about 5-10 different questions to this and change the pool semi-regularly. Bonus if one of the questions is "not politically correct" which may prevent the AI from being able to answer it. For example, any references to teens and stripping, or questions about common classics of the genre. For example the AI is probably not going to like to give a summary of "Those Pictures" or, depending on which AI provider it is using, the AI might outright refuse to answer due to content.

Set up new accounts to only be able to post in (and perhaps, see the posts of) a dedicated sub-forum. They'd need to be manually approved to use the full site. The rule would be something like "introduce yourself to be allowed to post everywhere." Spambot software like "Admin" would spam the snot out of it, but it would be easy cleanup.

There may be a plugin for phpBB that enables something like this. On Discord, for example, a common bot-check is to make you click a certain emoji in a rules thread to show you read, understood, and agreed to the rules. The thanks system over here may enable something similar. "Read this thread, hit thanks on this post to gain access."

[Buckaroo]

Would turning off new members fix this?