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Spam analysis

Posted: Fri Sep 13, 2013 1:34 am
by Jan_J
Hello,

last month in Polish forum we note abnormal number of spambot registrations.
Great part of them uses single e-mail portal and typical generated user names.
Do we have any tool to collect user names/addresses according to regexp pattern, and who can use it?

Re: Spam analysis

Posted: Fri Sep 13, 2013 11:44 am
by Hagar Delest
No tools that I know.
On the English forum, we had this kind of attack in the past but much less now. So the regexp is seldom used.
Moderators should be able to use them in the ban interface.

Re: Spam analysis

Posted: Fri Sep 13, 2013 1:26 pm
by RGB
On the ES forum we had the problem of rising number of spammers too. For a time we banned those disposable email servers as soon as they were used and after a while (only seven or so servers) the spammers almost disappeared. But then, after months of peace, this year they started to use an infinite source of accounts on a hight profile free email provider (perhaps they hacked the registration process there?)... and you cannot ban that kind of servers.

Once they start, the only way to stop them is to show that their "work" is useless: on the ES forum we enabled the first message moderation like here on EN forum and the problem was solved: When the spammers noticed that their messages never arrived to the public forum they almost disappeared again... at least for now...

Re: Spam analysis

Posted: Fri Sep 13, 2013 1:30 pm
by RoryOF
On Wednesday/Thursday morning mainly there is often a flood of kitchen cabinet emails, mostly originating from a server in Thailand. I banned the IP number, but I wouldn't be surprised if it resumed on another number on the same subnet. I ban them, delete their email which is undoubtedly spam, tag them with a descriptive word or two, and Hagar moves then to the banned list.

Re: Spam analysis

Posted: Fri Sep 13, 2013 5:06 pm
by Jan_J
Thanks,
moderators can apply some wildcards to emails or IPs, but that's not exactly what could be done using regexp. I expected that some migthy persons could ask database in the style like "select username, useremail from users where username similar to '[a-z]+[0-9]+' " for easy and precise preparation of the ban lists.

Re: Spam analysis

Posted: Fri Sep 13, 2013 5:37 pm
by RoryOF
Our banning is done usually on a case by case basis as postings arrive.