Random AD Bot?

[AphSgt]

Unfortunately, there's no sure fire way to get rid of the spammers. You can enable restricted registrations (as someone suggested), but then no one can register and it only huts your forum. You can also make it so new accounts have to be approved, but that can be a very tedious task depending on how many people you get registering per day. You can ban them, but it seems like there's always one more to take its place.



There's really nothing to do except to wait for them to spam, remove it, ban them, and just wait to see if it happens again. Even very big forums such as ForumPromotion (which is a non pb forum) has had this issue. (albeit not as often lately)

[moonbeam]

Restricted registration doesn't mean no one can register. It means the account must be approved before a new member can post.

[Tumbleweed]

Dec 7, 2013 3:14:22 GMT -8 lodan said:

this is disheartening I got that same message today which wouldn't have shocked me so much if it was in a board that allowed anyone but staff to add threads. I get that they added an account and used to to spam, what I don't get is how they got passed my permissions settings to post on the General information board right at the top of my page


If Proboards has some kind of black-listing capability, I'd recommend adding [e-mail] to it.

If you have your permissions set correctly they could not have been able to post. Double check all your settings. If you are unsure just log out, test all your boards to see if a guest can post on the boards you don't want them to. Then create an account and test again as a new member. 

[boxerfan]

Since my boards are financial and deal with stocks mostly traded just in the U.S., I've had no problem with banning basically entire countries by their IP. If one of these kitchen spammers (we get them a lot--or used to, until I started doing what I'm describing here) shows up, I check their IP address on a site such as www.iplocation.net and if it's a "questionable" country, I'll ban by just the first octet, e.g., 110.*, 115,*, 116.*, etc. I've got 16 like that now.

[Emma]

realitytvsmack.com


We had our registration on pending (restricted) and I noticed a Mailnesia.com email address from Indonesia waiting. I banned it after I looked up Mailnesia and found this article (below).  Right now I've disabled registration, closed the site down to guests and I noticed that ProBoards has a admin invited registration box where I can add the emails of recommended future members. They will receive a key to register.  We'll use this setting for future registrants. We are a small site and we're happy to keep it safe and small.  

The last message board we were on, Bravo, closed down due to spam. They were getting over 100 new spam members a day there. The spammers took over every board like a cancer and would quickly post after you posted.  They were shilling all sorts of products...sunglasses, designer bags, clothing, food, and on & on.  It was a horrible experience to have Bravo give up on the site and shut it down.  We're so happy to have found ProBoards...I just hope it can protect itself.

Here's the article:

Mailnesia and the New Wild West of Email
Bank Innovation
January 22, 2013
By JJ Hornblass

Do you know Dan Sharp? How about Cody Davis or Evan Austin or Gilbert Casper?

You don’t because they aren’t real people. They are phantoms of the new age of insane, spam-driven email.

In 2011, a venture called Mailnesia quietly kicked off. Mailnesia provides “anonymous” email addresses. What that means is a user can make use any @mailnesia.com email address they can think up on the spot — say, [e-mail] — and Mailnesia will automatically validate the account “instantly.”

But that’s not all Mailnesia does. Mailnesia provides spammers with an “automatic” registration capability. Here’s how the site describes it:

If email contains activation/registration links to other sites, they will be automatically visited in the background without any user action. This is most useful for registrations or subscriptions on websites where you must click on an activation link in the message to complete your registration. This will be done without any user intervention, even without you reading the email!

So a spammer can literally write code that installs an @mailnesia.com email address on any site that a computer spider finds requiring registration and Mailnesia automatically facilitates the registration. This is, to put it bluntly, a spammer’s wet dream.

We know about Mailnesia, because over the past weekend we got blindsided by hundreds of @mailnesia.com registrations on Bank Innovation. Fortunately, we were able to resolve the matter, but the episode suggests that email-driven shenanigans are just getting started online. The degree of sophistication on the part of scammers seems to be advancing, as the recent MIT hacking episode suggests. This is not good.

[The Maniac On Wheels (The MOW)]

My forum was hit hard by them for awhile.

[moonbeam]

Dec 19, 2013 6:16:34 GMT -8 Emma said:

realitytvsmack.com


We had our registration on pending (restricted) and I noticed a Mailnesia.com email address from Indonesia waiting. I banned it after I looked up Mailnesia and found this article (below).  Right now I've disabled registration, closed the site down to guests......
------------------------------------------------------------------------

If email contains activation/registration links to other sites, they will be automatically visited in the background without any user action. This is most useful for registrations or subscriptions on websites where you must click on an activation link in the message to complete your registration. This will be done without any user intervention, even without you reading the email!

Proboards mails do not contain links to other sites that I've ever seen. You already have your forum on limited registration, so they cannot post until you approve them. And you already know not to approve accounts that have mailnesia. Therefore, disabling registration is overkill, IMO.

The article is helpful, but I think it's also a bit of a scare tactic.

[Craig]

ProBoards emails won't contain links to other forums, unless they have been included as part of the email contents.

[boxerfan]

I've found that banning by first/second octet (xxx.*, xxx.xxx.*) is sufficient to block most of the spam. On the 3 boards I'm an admin on, we now get about one spam per month.... usually some variation of "kitchens cabinets Edinburgh", lol

[Martyn Dale]

For those interested, we are planning some notable upgrades to detection for spammers such as this very early in the new year. As I will be heading up the work on it, it will largely depend on my workload with the final transitions of forums to v5 and such, but it will be done

[Jaguar]

Dec 24, 2013 11:18:52 GMT -8 Martyn Dale said:

For those interested, we are planning some notable upgrades to detection for spammers such as this very early in the new year. As I will be heading up the work on it, it will largely depend on my workload with the final transitions of forums to v5 and such, but it will be done

That is awesome news, thanks. Merry Christmas Proboards.

[Chaotico]

Dec 24, 2013 11:18:52 GMT -8 Martyn Dale said:

For those interested, we are planning some notable upgrades to detection for spammers such as this very early in the new year. As I will be heading up the work on it, it will largely depend on my workload with the final transitions of forums to v5 and such, but it will be done

Honestly, I thought you did a brilliant job already....

[Martyn Dale]

If the problem is still significant enough to warrant threads on the issue then it is not good enough

[mmhmm]

Dec 24, 2013 11:18:52 GMT -8 Martyn Dale said:

For those interested, we are planning some notable upgrades to detection for spammers such as this very early in the new year. As I will be heading up the work on it, it will largely depend on my workload with the final transitions of forums to v5 and such, but it will be done

Thanks, Martyn!  Your continued efforts to facilitate our desires to babble on are greatly appreciated!  Happy holidays!

[Martyn Dale]

You know what, I have some spare time, and I am quite bored of these guys. Lets see if I can work a little magic tonight.