Why is it that the forum has so much porn spam?

triato · Post by **triato** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 7:14 pm

I have never seen porn spam in other forums, why is it that this forum has so much. Can/will this be fixed?

Post by **loki1950** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 9:07 pm

Part of the problem is that we do not use the latest version of phpBB which would change the registration process to better detect bots as most of the spammers are bots till then it requires human response mine and i have to sleep sometime hope that explains some of the reasons.

Enjoy the Choice

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 1:57 am

That should be on safemode's v0.6 changelog. it has nothing to do with the game itself, but it is nonetheless completely necessary. I use the word 'necessary' in every other post, and I still can't spell it

. god bless spellcheck

Post by **ace123** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 2:02 am

Sadly, it's a lot of work to fix the forums.

I can see if there's a way to disable images in the "off topic" forum...

Post by **loki1950** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 2:13 am

I can see if there's a way to disable images in the "off topic" forum...

That would be useful but i have feeling the bots will spam the rest of the forum in response

Enjoy the Choice

Xit · Post by **Xit** » Wed May 07, 2008 2:57 am

Could images be made a privalege requiring at least X many posts? Or would that require upgrading the whole forum anyway?

Post by **ace123** » Wed May 07, 2008 9:34 am

I'll look into it again at some point.

The PHP code was pretty messy (as php tends to become when it's so huge)... but it should be possible to do something simple like a # of posts check before displaying some things.

I wish I could make it not 'helpfully' include any image files it finds as part of the post...

Or, we could upgrade to PhpBB 3? Don't know if I feel up to doing it but it shouldn't be that hard.

Dilloh · Post by **Dilloh** » Wed May 07, 2008 7:08 pm

You could as well try to implement those textual confirmation stuffs for posts, as seen on many other forums. Though I personally think it's a loss of comfort, but maybe you'll find a way to remove that stuff either individually (personal id proved), or after X posts.

Would be nice to find out how many of that spam stuff is actually being posted by bots.

Post by **ace123** » Thu May 08, 2008 10:44 am

Okay I got so fed up with two porn spam posts today (Luckily thanks to Firefox's "Load Images Automatically" checkbox I can safely exterminate them.)

Anyway this problem should be a done deal. I have not stopped spam posts, but I ran it through a script that modifies all URL's ("www.", "http://") so as to not become links, and also remove all [IMG] and [URL] tags in posts:

posting.php, line 560-576:

Code: Select all

                               if ($userdata['user_posts'] < 1 && $mode == 'newtopic') {
                                        $oldmsg = $message;
                                        $message = str_replace('http://','', $message);
                                        #$message = str_replace('[url','[urltagremoved', $message);
                                        #$message = str_replace('[URL','[urltagremoved', $message);
                                        $message = str_replace('[img','[imgtagremoved', $message);
                                        $message = str_replace('[IMG','[imgtagremoved', $message);
                                        $message = str_replace('www.','www .', $message);
                                        if ($message != $oldmsg) {
                                                $message .= '\n\n\n*****SPAM prevention*****\nSpammers are not allowed to post links to other sites in the first topic you make.\n';
                                                $message .= "If you are not a spammer, you can now click edit, uncheck ''Disable BBCode''  and fix up URLs in links, or reply to this post.\n\n";
                                                $message .="If this happened in error or you have a better way of preventing SPAM, please private message ''ace123''.]\n    -- forums/posting.php, line 560";
                                        }
                                        // Just in case:
                                        $html_on = 0;
                                        $bbcode_on = 0;
                                }

This won't stop spammers from posting, but it should stop most of them from including images... it's also a good test to see if they are humans making these posts, or actual bots (non-idiot humans can easily circumvent this so I might need to add tests for registration date or something else)

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Thu May 08, 2008 9:52 pm

From the test it seems to work right