berto
Posts: 20708
Joined: 3/13/2002
From: metro Chicago, Illinois, USA
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Orm
quote:
ORIGINAL: berto
It's better not to reveal anything. And to give no feedback -- just have actions silently fail, no error messages! -- leaving the spammers as clueless as possible.
It might be better for actions that just affect spammers but do remember that there are those that actually want to use the forum who are not spammers. And we do want new forum members to feel welcome here. So some of the actions might need to be revealed to avoid confusion or resentment.
But what do I know. 
If a spammer tries to register under the name "xxxsextoys" (or "viagra*" or "workathome*" or ...), just let the account registration fail silently, no error message, no feedback whatsoever.
If "xxxsextoys" is a legitimate account name by a legitimate user  , let him (or her!) contact the forum administrator via e-mail.
And so on. There are plenty of suspicious, blacklist-worthy keywords where, in all likelihood, it is a spammer, or a spam message subject.
But especially for deep probing attacks, attempts at direct access to non-public-facing web pages and/or forum subroutines -- common spam attack vectors, look at the web logs! -- identify such accesses, record the account name and accessing IP address, add them to the blacklist(s), just silently fail, give no feedback whatsoever, wherever possible. (I further suggest renaming and obfuscating the interior, non-public web pages and forum subroutines -- which spammers often attempt to attack directly.)
Before I gave up -- wasn't worth any trouble at all, my forum activity is so low-volume -- I was able cut down spam new account registrations, those able to bypass my defense mechanisms, from a dozen or two per day down to just 2 or 3 per month. (I could then analyze the 2 or 3 per month to see where they defeated my defenses, and extend the blacklist(s) and/or tweak the defense code. But in the end, I just decided it wasn't at all worth it.)
There are ways to do this without inconveniencing legitimate members. And if applied to new members only, without inconveniencing old members at all.
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RE: Spam extraordinaire - 
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