Spam is a pain. Let's try to defeat it.
WELCOME ON NEW SERVER
Spam has become one of the most annoying problems on the net.
Nowadays almost everybody running a website must deal with spam of one sort or the other
and unfortunately there is no way to eradicate the problem.
This website is dedicated to help online publishers find a way to deal
with spam and an appropriate solution for the specific requirements of their sites.
This website is a platform to discuss spam related topics, seek for help, learn from others,
provide usefull information and hopefully, as a result, enables participants
not only to reduce unwanted content on their sites but to develop strategies
to cope with future challenges before they become a problem.
This website is a vendor independent plattform to allow for a more general approach
to the underlying problem of spam - not limited to a specific publishing tool.
Most other sites unfortunately are focussed on a specific product only. So we hope
this site fills a gap for those seeking generic insight or help.
NOTE:
We do NOT provide any sort of service on the topic other than keeping this
site up for the interested folks, we do not sell any products through this site
and we definitely won't allow this site to become a marketplace for anything but the
free exchange of information!
Anti Spam Blog - Preview of Latest Articles:
Still alive It's been a while since I lasted posted to this blog and can't predict when I'll post again. Depends on what's going to happen on this server in future. Spam is still a topic on the net and we've learned a lot during the past years. Currently we're playing with filters again to get rid of unwanted visitors to our sites. It's not only spam posts submitted to forums or blogs which are unwanted. Whenever I take a look at the logfiles of any server there are tons of harvesters pulling resources for no good. Sometimes it's really annoying to see how much resources are wasted. There are people out there buying larger servers just to serve all those blackhats harvesting sites for forms and email addresses. At some point it's enough and one tries to get rid of those unwanted bots. Good news is that it's always possible to have some fun driving them away. Unfortunately after some time they are back and the next round begins. Currently we've ...
read more Talk about spam - Why? Since the early days of the World Wide Web I'm running interactive websites allowing for user generated content of various type. Classifieds, forums, membership sites and the like. During all these years I've seen the web becoming more popular and more people getting connected to the internat. Unfortunately the accelerated development of the net simultaneously changed the initial "good faith" towards a profit-oriented approach and nowadays the majority of activity on the net is "running a business". I'm not against business on the net, not at all. But I believe this development is the key for understanding the increasing spam problems siteowners are facing these days. Must admit I've had a hard time learning how to deal with these chanllenges during the past years. But looking back at what I learned the time spent wasn't wasted. Here's a catchy example which can serve as an introduction on the topic: Take Google's approach of "ranking" websites or figuring ...
read more
Spam Fighters Forum - Recent Topics:
NEW: honeypots .... are working fine. Installed several meanwhile and it's amazing how may forms are posted.
NEW: The fun part begins Didn't last long and our friends have found this new site I've got a couple of simple traps installed which work pretty well. No big news yet. Building traps BTW catches two birds with one stone: it helps to learn about the spammers behaviour and thus helps to improve filtering technique. Second it's a way to guide bots to the traps, leaving the real forms alone. RL.
NEW: SpamPoison.com Any opinions about this? Why would a spammer's bot be "sucked into" that link? Wouldn't it be smart enough to avoid it? The only way I can see that working is if it used one of the same techniques they often use, spoofing the IP/address with an ever-changing list they could never keep track of. http://english-101029351073.spampoison.com/
NEW: IP blacklists There are a number of IP blacklists available on the Net one could use with with software that maintain lists of banned IPs. Some of these lists consists of thousands of addresses. Would using them cause a performance drag on certain forum applications that use that technique, or is the hashing such that the size of the list is not very important?
NEW: Identifying posts with excessive links as spam I guess this could go either here or over on the Tetra forum. I searched through the variables and forum posts but didn't see anything relating to this, so I'll post my question here because it relates and may get the ball rolling--so to speak. Holding posts for moderation that contain an excessive number of links seems to be an effective way of controlling some spam. On a friend's Tetra site, most of the spammers make posts with a large number of links (usually more than 10). ...
NEW: Welcome to the board at TalkAboutSpam.org New website and forum are open to the public now. Everybody interested in the topic of dealing with spam is welcome to participate. Feel free to raise your questions, thoughts and suggestions. However there are a few simple rules on this site: play nice respect others no overflowing off-topic discussion no blantant advertisments stay cool if your post gets moderated - or register a profile to bypass the filters Other than that I hope you'll enjoy and participate. R.
