The Constant Fight Against Spam

[Chris Stewart]

It's no secret that vBulletin, the software that powers iPhone Dev SDK, is often the target of both automated and non-automated spammers. They sign up for accounts, verify them via email, and then will either send out masses of private messages, post obvious spam threads, or create a spam signature and then send their profile page all over the web by spamming other domains. It's frustrating, for all of us. I spend the majority of my time combating this on a daily basis.

I get dozens of emails every day from the members of this site as they report these posts and threads. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. I try and respond, by deleting the post and banning the offender, as quickly as I can. I really appreciate the effort you all put in towards fighting these individuals.

Further steps have been taken to help our community with spam. Upon registration, each user is now verified against a well-known vBulletin spammer database for their email, IP, and chosen user name. If they match in this database, their registration is denied. Users that do pass this verification are now put into a "New Members" user group. This user group comes with limited permissions with regard to some of the ways spammers take advantage of the system. New Members do not have access to private messaging and can not have a signature. I'm also looking at how to limit this group to not being able to post links. Those measures should combat the majority of spam we see on a daily basis. After 10 posts and 7 days, members from the New Members group are automatically promoted to the Registered Members group which provides them with the normal level of access to the site.

I hope everyone understands why these limitations have been put into place. Spammers suck, but unfortunately they're a reality and there's nothing we can do to eliminate them completely without a little give and take.

Chris

[Kalimba]

Good to hear that there are measures that can be and have been taken to reduce the spam. I think placing new members under quarantine until they've proven their mettle is a great idea and shouldn't have any negative side effects. Most legitimate new members are really here to post questions.

[CommanderData]

It seems these measures are not effective... this guy "iphones0666" just posted two stupid cell phone spam messages within minutes of each other. I reported them both, but what else can you do? He didn't post links so you can't detect that. This one put e-mail (obfuscated) and a UK address and phone number.

Stupid jerk is even still logged in as I am writing this

[Chris Stewart]

Yeah, it's hard. There are various levels of effectiveness when it comes to combatting spam. I can say that over 2,000 registrations today were denied using the new tools put in place. I would absolutely call that progress. On some level there just isn't much more that can be done. The next step is not allowing new members to post threads, but that causes issues with legitimate members and all the spammer has to do is get the required number of posts.

[deansx]

I'm sorry that you had to take these steps, but I totally understand. We were having the same issues with our blogs and we had also had to take measures to restrict comments. It's sad.

[imaciphone]

Originally Posted by deansx

I'm sorry that you had to take these steps, but I totally understand. We were having the same issues with our blogs and we had also had to take measures to restrict comments. It's sad.

I'm having a problem posting a message. When I attempt to post I receive the following message:

You are only allowed to post URLs to other sites after you have made 15 posts or more.

I have not posted to this forum yet - this would be my first posting.

As far as I can tell - there are no links whatsoever in my posting - to this site or any other. Can you please tell me how I can submit my posting?

Thanks!

[Kalimba]

Originally Posted by imaciphone

I'm having a problem posting a message. When I attempt to post I receive the following message:

You are only allowed to post URLs to other sites after you have made 15 posts or more.

I have not posted to this forum yet - this would be my first posting.

As far as I can tell - there are no links whatsoever in my posting - to this site or any other. Can you please tell me how I can submit my posting?

Thanks!

I believe there are certain characters, or combination of characters, that are recognized as URLs, when they might not actually be. I've seen other posts that indicate the "@" symbol in a post is being read as such. Try removing the obvious patterns in your post ("@", ".com", "www.", etc.) and see if that helps.

BTW, it's obvious that you are, in fact, able to post messages. The trick is to determine what's triggering the URL spam filter and remove that from your message.

[imaciphone]

Well, not sure why the "at" symbol would trigger this (I can't even type it here otherwise I won't be able to post this message) - but that was the reason I could not post my other message.

And yes, it was obvious I could post a message - just not one containing an "at" symbol.

Thanks for the quick response Kalimba.

[odysseus31173]

Good job wielding the ban hammer on the attempted 2000 accounts.

[Chris Stewart]

I'm still tweaking on the "15 posts limit" to find a good balance. As we've seen, they can still post without the links. We'll see where that goes I guess.

On another note, we've now rejected 16,000+ registration attempts since it was put into place 2 days ago. That's at least putting some form of dent into the process.

[Knertified]

Chris,

The code below will strip BBCODE at the usergroupid level. I wrote it and tested it on my board after seeing your problem. Hope it helps!

To Install: Create a new plugin inside of plugin manager and hook it to "newpost_process".

Substitute whatever usergroupid you want.

if ($vbulletin->userinfo['usergroupid'] == 6)
{
 $pattern = '|[[\/\!]*?[^\[\]]*?]|si';
 $post['message'] = preg_replace($pattern, '', $post['message']);
}

[Magic Tricks]

You may have already looked at Askimet, for blogging... but I believe that is only for Wordpress, etc.

As a side note, I am interested in the development side of iPhone. As a magician, there are plenty of apps that can be made.

Where should I direct my energy first?