If only I knew how to do something about it.
who runs this forum? It would be pretty simple and take maybe a day to beef up the security of the forums. Add a captcha, and limit posts per hour. Im sure people wouldnt mind a 5 thread limit per hour. Unlimited posting in the comments, but cap the new threads.
Its not a person flooding the site with spam, its a spambot - a computer program. A person designed and created the program, and a person may have added the forum to their victims list, but the spamming is done by a computer program.
“It’s all automated. Tools like xrumer are built, and sold, and contain the ability to exploit software with known vulnerabilities. Anyone can buy it and after setting it up it’s more or less fire and forget. It goes to every forum in its list and tries to spam it to the best of its ability. Just due to brute force it is successful and worth it for the spammers. That’s why they never stop. They barely have to lift a finger for it to work.”
One thing I learned long ago is that website ranking is of huge importance to companies that advertise on the internet. If you search “surfboard fin boxes” for example, the guy who’s link shows up on page 5 isn’t going to get much business, but the ad that shows up at the top of page 1 gets loads. Ranking is often done by hits, meaning websites who are already getting the most hits will be ranked higher, since they are viewed as more popular. Google wants you to use them to search, so when you do type in a search term, they want to give you the popular answer, to keep you coming back.
By flooding the internet with links (in spam) there are always a percentage of people who will click the link out of curiosity, anger, or even by accident. Every click helps to make their website to appear more popular and desirable, and increases the likelihood of getting a higher ranking. So dizzying amounts of spam are spread over the internet by programs designed to do just that - no one at the spammer source reads the forum or belongs to the forum or even cares the smallest bit about the forum - other than as a platform to spread spam.
It would be nice if the spam could be filtered out, or the spambot memberships somehow hindered, but as a moderator I have no input in that process. And with the tenacity of the spammers and their tech savvy-ness, they could be counted on to eventually figure a way to bypass the restrictions. So for me, as a moderator, the only recourse I have is to delete the spam and the spammer accounts. And all they do is open a new account and proceed as usual.
While I despise the spammers, my goal isn’t to get back at them, my goal here is to keep this forum usable for those of us who still love the sharing of surfboard information that occurs here daily. So me, and the other moderators, just keep deleting away every time we see the doggone stuff. That’s the best we can do, and we’re doing it the best we can. Suggestions have been offered for screening spammers out, but as a website designer I’m pretty sure the site owner already knows a lot of this. If there is anything more he could do, I really don’t know, and that kind of stuff is above my pay grade.
You’re a good man, Huck.
Thank you to you and all the mods.
thanks n.s.b.
I know there have been several posts giving suggestions on screening out or limiting the spammers. I honestly don’t know how much of the regular forum posts are read by the site owner, but I do know he has posted on here on rare occasions, so I have to assume he does read some of this stuff.
There is also a forum folder for moderators, that is not accessible to the general membership. Its one of the least active folders, nothing much going on there since shapaholic left, haha, but myself and Keith Melville have also posted over there alerting the site owner to the increase in spamming activity, and I have suggested some type of limitation or restriction on new posters.
I also think I’m not the only moderator trying to check in a little more frequently, since the spammers have stepped up their game lately.
Yes it’s a spambot, but there’s a real person who has to manually get on the forum to insert it. The goal is to find any personal contact info and sell whatever is found to a group who is offering to buy it. It happens when you click on those bogus posts if you’re logged in. This is the reason for the large number of those posts, they’re hoping that someone will click just one of them. Any forum with a large amount of traffic is targeted. The big picture is to get enough data on users of google, facebook, etc. so they can hack into those sites on a massive scale. Once there they can get some deep-pockets ransom from those larger companies. But it starts small with spam like this, then others take that data and go after the individuals they snagged for more info. Don’t log in if you see this spam and never click on any of it. If you have a remembered log in, discontinue and do it manually. I have no idea about the security used on this forum, but in my experience even the very best is just a thin shield today unless you have a skilled team monitoring 24/7.
xlnt info, take note everyone!
What forum software is this? There is probably an capture protection upgrade available for it.
I’m not particularly handy with this stuff but I might be able to set it up. Though probably someone living near a moderator would be more sensible?
Really, it’s been covered, it’s outsourced, there should be a easy to install plugin and there are even people around more than willing to help, some maybe very able too 
Suggestions posted here may or may not be read by the site owner, I have no way of knowing.
Suggestions regarding software are pointless to direct to moderators, who have no access to the forum software.
The only person with access to the forum software is the site owner with whom I have no direct access other than via pm, same as everyone.
If you have software suggestions for the site owner the most logical approach would probably be via pm.
Swaylock’s is like Toy Story. Andy (Mike) outgrew his childhood toys, and the toys haven’t realized it yet. Woody (Huck) is trying to keep it all together. I must be Mr. Potato Head.
Hahaha
Hashtag I get to be Slinky Dog
I’m sure I saw that flick, but I guess the plot didn’t stick with me, don’t remember much other than the toys came to life, haha.
I would have paid better attention if I had recognized the prophetic nature of the story line!!
Now on the other hand, if you had said swaylocks is puff the magic dragon and mike is jackie paper…
.
Persistent Mudda Fakka, this one is.
There’s now more Chinese posts than real posts so it’s a waste of time to return…
Peace out !