Category: Articles and Resources

Low Life Spammers

Posted by AWS – February 20, 2009

Dealing with low life spammers on a daily basis is no fun. If you have a community website or a blog you know that low life spammers make administration harder than it has to be. Sure Akismet and captcha help. They just aren’t effective enough to catch all the spam a low life spammer spews.

I have been tracking and logging spam bots for a while. I classify a bot as a spam bot if it doesn’t follow robots.txt. I just started to track users that use these bots and I log IP, username and email address. What I am going to do is list these users and their information. I will keep the list updated so you can reference it and block these low life spammers. Check back here often to keep up to date with new additions to the low life spammer list.

Here is the low life spammer list. If you want to add to it post a comment on the low life spammer list page and I’ll add it.

The Low Life Spammer list was updated on March 18TH, 2009. New low life spammers added.

A Day in the Life of a Network Admin

Posted by AWS – February 16, 2009

Here is a little incite to what a day in the life of a network admin can be. This is from one day last week, but it is typical of most days. My day will start at 4:30AM most mornings and end anywhere form 8:00PM to Midnight. It all depends on how much work I have scheduled or any problems that I find while doing my checks. Read on to see what a typical day is like.

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Combating vBulletin Forum Post and PM Spam

Posted by AWS – February 14, 2009

One of the most frustrating jobs for any vBulletin forum admin or moderator is the never ending fight to stop post and PM spam. There are spambots that specifically target vBulletin forums. vBulletin has helped by adding Akismet spam protection, captcha protection, simple question and answer or reCaptcha to help combat post spam. This was effective until the vBulletin captcha was cracked. The Q&A, in my testing also doesn’t seem, to be effective. These are the measure I’ve taken to help combat the fight against spam.

To stop the post spam I use reCaptcha.  It seems to be the most effective against spambots, but, for the low life spammers that still do things manually even reCaptcha doesn’t help. The main purpose of these spammers is to get backlinks to their sites and services. What I did was create a new usergroup called Registered Members. The new group has the same privileges as the default Registered Users group.

Read on to see how to set up the registered users group and the new registered members group permissions to help combat vBulletin forum spam.

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