Some of the other info there is really weird too.
The top three search terms are
1.delphi tableviewer
2.delphi forums (Ok, makes a little sense)
3.driver swag (???)
4.chief delphi (why is this number 4?)
That is cool.
OFF TOPIC: Also, i wonder where the web industry is going. My site running on a Pi has quite a high rank and is 50% speed rank.
I just went through 10 pages of search results for “Driver swag.” I found nothing but lost hopes for humanity. All the others have this forum pop up on the first page.
Spock eyebrow raise
Fascinating.
Tangent: About half of the spam posts titles are mildly informative about world news events. If you’re too immersed in robots, it’s a good way to keep up to date on current events.
That being said, it’s still a net detriment. (no pun intended)
Kind of off topic:
I placed a link to my forum (devstuff.no-ip.info/forum/) and said how wimpy it was (it runs on a raspberry pi). Apparently, the forum members are so helpful, they DoSed it! After reviewing the log files and other stuff, I found out that it was just because it was overloaded with requests. That gave me an idea of where I need to patch it up and now I am working on adding a maximum processes limit that will prevent apache from hogging all the resources from the kernel. The funny thing was that this time, the crash was so severe, even my UART connection was useless for degugging :). That made me do a hard reset :(. I do not think that that is a problem to the forum, but admins, you may want to place a resource cap to prevent the server from hogging all the resources, causing a kernel panic. I wish that there was a way to recover the logs from the kernel panic. However, that isn’t safe as writing to the disk after the computer has crashed is VERY risky!
You aren’t exactly familiar with CD history, so here’s a couple of tidbits.
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Legend has it that Brandon (the webmaster) used to put the CD server in a bulletproof case shortly before Kickoff, so that damage to surrounding things was minimal when it exploded. Not sure how true the exploding part is, but we’ll go with that.
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There was at one time a resource cap. Due to the amount of traffic, Brandon at one point locked the number of users online to a certain maximum–spiders were banned temporarily, guests had lower priority, registered users who were over the max couldn’t get on for a while until someone else got off. Shortly afterward, the server got more space, so the limits were lifted.
And 3): The current solution is a bit of cloud-based server. Resources can be added in or removed to handle increased traffic (say, adding another couple of servers around Kickoff for the traffic, and letting them slide out in April or so). No issues other than the odd forum downtime, generally for an upgrade or to add in a server or three.
How about setting up a system where every post/edit MUST be reviewed by a moderator before being put up. It is easy to get past a filter, but people are much harder to trick.
The mods do a great job cleaning up the spam that gets through. They do not have the time to approve everything. When you report spam or questionable content, they get notified by email.
There needs to be a balance. I think it works here.
I think the webmasters have a life! Having to moderate every post will mean ChiefDelphi will need an army of moderators to approve the posts. Also, The posts won’t show up until they are approved, which can be after something like possibly 24 hours! Instead, the first few posts should be moderated
How about (when somebody registers), putting up a picture of someone like Dean Kamen or Woodie Flowers and asking for the person’s last name. It’s something that everyone involved in our community should know, but not so much outside. If they honestly don’t know, make them register with admin approval.
Probably not the best thing to hear, but I don’t know how these people look like even though I am on an FRC team. :yikes:
Then your registration would need an admin approval.
I’m pretty sure many people do not know how these people look. Most newbies won’t know it either. maybe, we could have a captcha gif instead, with moving characters to make OCRs have a harder time!
I quick google search would show you their faces. You should try it sometime.
I don’t think that would work. If you’re given a picture of some person you don’t know, you’d have to do a reverse image search. If you do that, than anyone could do that easily.
My suggestion would be to change the captcha system to something like reCAPTCHA or Confident CAPTCHA, which John Fogarty suggested on page 3.
OK. Anyways, how would the moderators know whether it is a spambot or it is a actual person. What if the spammer creates the account by himself and allows the spambot to login off that account?
:deadhorse: :deadhorse: :deadhorse: :deadhorse: :deadhorse:
I feel like the “multiple users report and it gets removed” is a good idea right about now. Seems like there is always a few threads around and about with people reporting them for spam, then it waits for someone else to remove it. Or again with the previously mentioned "Gets moved to an un-viewable thread to non-mods/admins who can either dump it or put it back up.
Is there a list somewhere off all mods/admins? I am kinda curious as to who of them are still active or not. Also, is there somewhere you can offer to be a mod? Perhaps another group could be made solely to remove spam if they see it. No more permissions other than moving threads to a spam folder for someone else to review and delete? How hard would these be to implement?
HELP!!! My random forum is being spammed with new members, all spambots. I can tell they are spambots because the email addresses are random!:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
Any suggestions?
I zoomed out! Here is a list.
somerandomuser and admin are the only valid users, as far as I know!
Do you think the spam is directly from a human or a spam bot. I mean I only see the spam threads once about everyday, it’s not like they are flooding the whole entire forum so all we see is spam until we scroll down. Though what happens if the spammer turns out to be a person who is in the FIRST FRC competition themselves? What would we do then, I mean we have somebody who knows how these forums opperate and everything. Where I am going with this is that during the build season /competition season (January-April). Thats when these forums are going to be the most busy with threads and everything. So if you say this person (the spammer) was part of the FRC competitions themselves they would know the perfect time to flood this place with spam. If I was a spammer targeting Chief Delphi forums I would flood the place with spam during January-April when these forums would be busy with normal people trying to ask questions about their and other’s robots and answer them.
So for the next few days I plan to:
- Examine the spammers user anme
- The email address they use
- look for patterns (with their name and email)
- Their team # they are using
- location they do give
and more
Also if you notice the spammer is always using a different account
(because they have to ofcourse)
So in the next week or so I plan to have a report on the spammer about what I know and ways we can prevent it.
If someone wants a temporary mod account on my forum to see the types of spam coming, it may give a hint of what to look for on this forum. The email addresses are made up of random letters, gmail or hotmail! I think Google and Microsoft might like this to see what is happening with their email accounts!