spoof members?

can a forum be spammed?

[buksida]

I run a small local forum with about 300 members. Recently I've noticed an increase in join-ups which is nothing unusual. Checking the member list i notice a similarity in their email and websites (a lot ending in @mail.ru which is a russian site). My forum is based in Thailand. The website they use is a jewellery vendor.

None of these new members have posted yet, should I be suspicious? Is it possible to spam a forum by spoofing fake members? Should I mail them to confirm membership or switch member activation to manual?

[BillPosters]

Suggested reading:
[britecorp.co.uk...]

Esp.
[britecorp.co.uk...]

[edited by: Woz at 7:20 am (utc) on April 28, 2004]
[edit reason] linked URLs [/edit]

[Nick_W]

Priceless.

>spamming

Sure, happens all the time dude...

Nick

[martinibuster]

Yeah, check the websites they list, usually pron sites. Check out phpBB hacks website and download some anti-robot mods that will prevent the spambots from visiting.

I'm working on this myself.

[balam]

That series of articles really gave me a good chuckle...

C'mon now, if I'm dead, do I care if someone is spamming my site? If I'm six feet under the dirt, please feel free to spam my blog.

[Marcia]

It's being done a lot now with memberlist.php and similar being sought out. There has to be some pre-approval process to prevent it happening.

>>Should I mail them to confirm membership

I wouldn't - that's giving a verified email address to add to spam email lists.

>>or switch member activation to manual?

Switch it to manual, and make it so it won't appear if they're not approved. They don't care about membership, they just want the link.

There are many ways to spam forums - not just member lists, and some are harder to catch. There's some great info and explanations about forum spamaming here, in a discussion we had a while back

Professional Forum Spammers

[webmasterworld.com...]

[buksida]

Great replies, thanx. Heres what I've done:

1) disallowed memberlist.php in robots.txt (already done)
2) set member activation to manual
3) removed website from suspect members profile
4) deleted usernames begining with!
5) banned emails *@mail.ru
6) disallowed usernames *!
7) deleted usernames with porn websites

I cant believe people will go to all the effort of filling in the form just to get a link. I'm pretty sure there are about 15 spammer members there so safe to delete them all?

[Marcia]

Bots, they're used for log spamming, too.

[Rosalind]

This is what I do: members of my site can list their website in their profile, but it's only visible to other members who are logged on. That way the search engines can't see it, so no value to the spammers.

[Leosghost]

<<http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum19/472.htm >>

superb thread ...please next time... Marcia... you aught to tell us that we'll spend at least an hour reading and getting no work done .... : ))