What the hell is all this porn

[Rusty Barrels]

Is this acceptable with you mates? How can this be stopped? I wonder how many younger mates veiw this board.

[Rats]

Already sent a request..... Seems they really can't do much!

Pretty bad when you tell folks from work about the PUB only to have an onslaught of spammers atack.... Hell wit em!

[Capt. Sterling]

Is this acceptable with you mates? How can this be stopped? I wonder how many younger mates veiw this board. 

Mine USE to...

[Red Cat Jenny]

Well I had noticed in one of the banner ads was a site for "Gay pirate porn" could be some of our "sponsors" are redirecting this stuff by association. I havent seen the ad again. But then I've been too busy. Also this is a live person and not an auto spammer. The admin might benefit from sitting on at night and watching for these scum who also keep choosing that little icon. string em from the yardarm says I!!

[Patrick Hand]

Mission who is able to do something about this, (and he does a good job at it) says he can only delete this kinda thing....

I just wonder if there was a change on the "terms of use" .... what you agreed when you signed up to post in the Pub......

That lets the Pub charge the spammers for thier space......

Post porn.... not pyracy... then we charge you $50.00 per day.....

Hey... you agreed when you signed up to post here.......

Leagaly binding contract...........

Yah... I know it won't work.....

[blackbonie]

im a member of several forums. two get NO spammers at all, one is almost 100% spammers,and then this one is getting worse daily. i just wonder how the other 2 manage to keep them away. and they are huge with over 10,000 members each.

[Red Cat Jenny]

Requiring a valid email address (from a service that actually requires some info from you) helps.

Also there are some good Linux tips here

http://www.howtoforge.com/block_spam_at_mt...a_level_postfix

Apparently as of May there is an 80% increase in spam of this kind across the board.

Backtracking IP's and email origins and tracerouting takes some work and time (may already be employed) but it can yield a trend which might help. I had my forum busted by porn posters using anonymizer.com. I contacted Anonymizer and accused then of enabling attacks on my site. They were forthcoming with the bulk group of IP addresses they employ and I blocked them all which greatly reduced the problem.

[Capt Grey]

I also have the power to delete spammers on this forum. Mission covers it while he's at work and I cover it evenings and weekends. But since neither of us is online 100% of the time, some of it is bound to stick around for a while. All we can do is ask for your indulgence while we deal with it.

One way to keep spammers out is to make a a message board private. That means NO ONE but registered users can see the board. But for a board like this that wants to share information with people, registered or not, that wouldn't work.

Another method I use on one of my other boards is to check each registration individually; but that won't work with members in the 1000s.

The moderators have an ongoing discussion about this problem and the best way to solve it. Right now we only have moderators deleting the offending topics when we find it; it's not perfect, but it's the best plan at the moment.

[Tartan Jack]

There are 2 sides to it:

Popularity-> how far up the recognition level is the forum for search engines?

Software-> how much filtering is there within the software used by the forum to counter the porn.

From what I understand: The spammers are placing links here, so that bots from the search engines locate the incoming and outgoing links. The more times a site is linked, the higher its perceived popularity and value-> so the higher it is in the searches on the search engines. Accordingly, they seek to place links on as many sites as possible, taking advantage of weaknesses in forum software. The better software packages are continually updating to try and block spamming and foil "spam bots" (as a friend calls them).

One of the forums I frequent (and am one of the moderators) had an increasing "porn invasion" problem. There began to be an added "hacker" threat, too (multiple forum issues). So, the principle/owner updated to one of the best software forms (a PAY one, for software use) and there hasn't been a porn spam post since (that I have seen).

SO, I am wondering what software is used here.

(OH MY, I SOUND like I know what I am talking about-> SCARY!)

[captjacksparrowsavvvy]

I run Marty's board and as good as the software is for registering, we still get hit with viagra pirates, porn pirates, gambling pirates and job pirates.

The only thing that works right now is the delete button and I try to go in everyday to delete but we all know how that goes, especially if you have a real life!

It's annoying and crosses the line when children are allowed to be on these forums, ALTHOUGH...parents should monitor young children on the internet. I did, and still do, and my kids are "older"...Parents cannot be on all the time either and it should be a parents responsibility to keep a close eye on the kids.

AND I also believe that if you run a forum or website, that there should be a good amount of supervision as well.

I highly doubt that the TOU have changed to allow porn advertising.

It's not illegal, and probably will never be illegal but it needs to be controlled. I am for live and let live but not if you are going to shove it in my face or post it around kids.

This is a cute story but oh so true. My son was doing a project on the US government. This was 7th grade so he was about 11. We had just gotten the internet and decided to look online for info on the US government.

Me, being the mommy and wanting to help, typed in "whitehouse.com"...seriously thinking that it would take me to the Whitehouse. Well, yeah, it took me to the white house allright, a brothel of some sort with anything and everything bouncing across the screen.

I went into the school the next day and told the teachers about it and of course their response was" we do not control where the children go on the internet at home" and my response was, CYA(cover your arse) then print up a reference sheet with legitimate government websites as a guidance for the children to do their reports at home. It wasn't a day later when the teachers had done that. How many kids didn't have a parent standing over them at the time...How did I know that the government is a dot gov?

Anyway, if the goofy posts are not deleted right away, just don't reply or open them. It will eventually be deleted.

[Matusalem]

The main board has a menu who shows who's watching what. That's why I say "you know who you are...we know who you are". Anyone on this board doing the ol'" Pete Townshend" will have to live with the fact that we know where you've been.

[Misson]

My belief is that this board has been "found" by spammers or bots or some such. We already have the system where you have to register with a valid email, which makes me think that these are not bots. (But I'm not 100% certain. I don't intimately know how bots work.)

The variety of the posts also makes me think that there are several different sources. For a long time there were no pharmacy posts and all the porn links were either lists with no photos or photos of celebrities. Now there is a new type with photos and there is pharmacy stuff. So more of whom- or whatever have found us. Note that we still get the other links, so the older purveyors of spam are still with us.

I think we actually could check incoming registrations, though. I used to think this was a bad idea, but I am coming around. I monitored the number of spammers for a 5 day period and it was the same as the number of new registrants we had had for that week minus one (17 or 18). So, either we had one valid user register for that week and all the rest were spammers or else there was another spam link in another forum or one that Captain Grey deleted that I didn't happen to see. I would guess that our valid registrants per week are usually less than 10 on average. It would not be that hard to screen, although it would involve a delay in the ability of new users being able to post.

The only problem is that Booty would likely be stuck with this job. She works for the site owner (Bloody Buckets is his user ID) and appears to have been sort of given this job in addition to her more pressing jobs. So it's not like she can sit around a check every registration request as it comes in. Maybe the mods could do it - I don't know. I have collected a list of over 100 spammer usernames and they're not completely obvious, but neither do they look like typical usernames. There is a pattern of sorts to them and I think (at least at first) that most people could spot invalid spammers. (If only because they would not think to use "Captain" or "Jack" somewhere in their usernames. )