Mobile Bay Reef Keepers

Welcome you new moderators, Amphiprion and Scott.

Due to activity change in the board I have changed the moderators, until further notice. I am rarely on the board and these guys can clean up the spam and split / delete threads when needed.

Please welcome Fishfood aboard as our new moderator on the forums. He'll be helping out in general, especially with the new influx of spam bots.

Yeah the spam bots suck thanks fishfood

Well unfortunately the message boards have increasingly gotten more porn spam in 2010 and it is getting worse, with no end in sight. We are actually lucky compared to some.

Wanna see something funny? Check out the new accounts.
memberlist.php?mode=&sk=c&sd=d#memberlist

MBRK is internationally popular...

Looks like its about 5 new spam accounts a day. I think its funny when they post in a thread that hasn't been active in months instead of creating their own. I tend to check out the site every day during the week so I'll take out the trash when I see it.

I have actually gone to banning IP blocks and the list is growing pretty fast.

Its kind of getting out of hand. I stopped by the site this morning to see 27 posts that needed to be deleted and I banned 4 or 5 people and one of them had created an account while I was deleting those 27 posts. In the last week or so I've actually been at the site while about a half dozen of these spam accounts were being created and banned them as soon as they were created. Most of these accounts are created and then sit for a week or two then they spam up the board.

Definitely getting out of hand and there is no solution in sight just yet.

Fishfood wrote:In the last week or so I've actually been at the site while about a half dozen of these spam accounts were being created and banned them as soon as they were created.

It is getting ridiculous. I do the above what seems like constantly. I'll ban one and their IP, then another. I try to ban blocks when applicable, though. I don't know if anyone noticed, but right around late December and early January, much of it stopped, since one of the world's largest malware/spam botnets went down for whatever reason. They were back in short order and twice as bad, though. It's been on the rise substantially here since about mid-April overall, too.

There are too many a day to be human beings, just damn near impossible. I started thing about it, I think the BOTS are actually getting the challenge quest answers from the question so I changed it. Lets see what happens in a week. This of course does not help on the ones that have registered.

well whatever you changed it to its working.

Would you believe the bots were figuring out basic math and automatically doing the challenge question. Skynet is alive !

I also went ahead and cleaned out all of the false registrations. I may had missed a stray one or two, but I did delete thousands.