SillyDog701

by **Antony** » Mon 03 Nov, 2008 10:54 am

Firstly, I'd like to apologise for the inconvenience caused due to the MySQL database server was crashed last night. It resulted SillyDog701 Message Centre was unaccessable for about 2 hours.

The database has since been repaired.

Recently, we have faced a huge increase on spam registering on SillyDog701 Message Centre. Most of those accounts only registered with some junk information but a link to spammer's website (in website field). As we all know that Google ranking works on number of links to the site, and spammers would try everything to get their pages up in Google search.

To overcome this issue, I implemented Anti-Spam ACP today (on top of some other private MODs already implemented), and I will monitor the spamming activities for the next few days.

Honestly speaking, our forum is not that seriously damaged by spammers and spam bots. However, most anti-spam measures work well against spam bots (automatic scripts), but they can not stop human spammers.

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by **profman** » Tue 04 Nov, 2008 2:51 am

Thanks for putting in so much time to make SillyDog a quality site!

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by **Antony** » Fri 14 Nov, 2008 12:03 pm

Thanks profman.

I'd like to post a report. After installing the Anti-Spam ACP tool, the registration and the memberlist display settings have been changed.

I did a measurement that during a 6 days 6 hours and 24 minutes period, there were 1533 spam registration attempts that did not go through. That is about 244 spam registrations a day. (Please be advised that the number is the amount of bot-registrations which manage to pass my private tweak of forum registration processes.)

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by **Happy Dude** » Mon 17 Nov, 2008 5:38 am

Are you using PHPBB3...? I suggest you upgrade to PHPBB3... seems to have fixed the spam problem on a couple of sites I moderate (which had ALOT of spam)... although, if you plan to use this theme I don't see it going over well without alot of recoding :S

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by **Antony** » Mon 17 Nov, 2008 7:13 am

Thanks for the suggestion. the software will be updated to phpBB3 one day.

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by **Mandrake** » Mon 17 Nov, 2008 11:52 am

Antony wrote:Thanks for the suggestion. the software will be updated to phpBB3 one day.

I'd also like to thank Antony for the time he puts in to make this an excellent website! I'd also urge caution on an upgrade to phpBB3. The current phpBB2 software has proven to be reliable and it works very well, though if the phpBB3 software has more sophisticated anti-spam technology that could well be a reason for strongly considering the upgrade.

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by **Antony** » Mon 17 Nov, 2008 11:39 pm

Thanks Mandrake.

I am not that in hurry to upgrade the software, however, I do keep an eye on the development of phpBB.

phpBB and many other popular forum software are being studied by the spammers (bots). So far, (in my opinion) we do pretty well on combating forum spammers (bots). As for those human spammers sitting in front of the computer and entering everything, besides deleting their posts, I don't think there's any efficient automatic way on blocking them.

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by **Happy Dude** » Tue 18 Nov, 2008 12:09 am

Might I add, PHPBB3 gives moderators more control over what they can do, including banning users. Might be good to upgrade soon, PHPBB2 will no longer be supported from January (?) 2009.

But yeah, this theme will need alot of recoding by the looks of it to work on PHPBB3.

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by **J-M** » Wed 19 Nov, 2008 5:19 am

Thanks for pointing to the facts of pHPBB2.x.

Information about the retirement was published here in April 2008 already.

Download links of 2.x are gone already!
http://www.phpbb.com/downloads/

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by **Antony** » Wed 19 Nov, 2008 7:59 am

Some of you should know me that I am not kind of person who rush for the updates simply a newer version is out. It is not saying that I don't take security seriously.

J-M wrote:Download links of 2.x are gone already!
http://www.phpbb.com/downloads/

Actually, phpBB 2.0.xx are still available.
http://www.phpbb.com/downloads/legacy.php

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by **Pu7o** » Fri 21 Nov, 2008 7:23 pm

Personally, when it comes to preventing spam any kind of automatic attacks, I prefer the use of something that isn't as widespread as phpBB, if anything for the whole "security via obscurity" thing.

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by **Antony** » Sat 22 Nov, 2008 12:31 am

Pu7o wrote:Personally, when it comes to preventing spam any kind of automatic attacks, I prefer the use of something that isn't as widespread as phpBB, if anything for the whole "security via obscurity" thing.

Thanks Pu7o.
That is a very good point. We do have some private modifications implemented which I don't think I shall document it in detail.

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SD701 database error and fighting spam

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