New type of spam

[Cortig]

I received today a PM (private message) from someone saying "I am new to the forum, my name is Jim and I wanted to introduce myself and say hi!!!"

The person had 0 post on the group and a signature inviting me to take a look at his site with a tinyurl address.
Adding preview. to the address, I can see that it redirects to a clickbank.net subdomain…

This type of spammer is quite new to me. I hope they won't catch too many people :-(

[Forrest]

I know it rubs some people the wrong way, but I've mentioned here before that sometimes blocking IP ranges work best. I've done that elsewhere and it effectively eliminated spam and we have yet to receive a single complaint.

[Forrest]

I just got it too.

[Cortig]

I remain opposed to IP filtering. People do the same thing with e-mails, blacklinsting the SMTP servers of several ISPs and all the users of these ISPs end up blacklisted. I think it's an unfair policy that will affect people who haven't dine a thing to deserve it :-\

[Forrest]

Unlike email spam, forum spam tends to come from very specific IP blocks. It's much easier to block forum spam via IP and not block valid users.

[Cortig]

I'm not so sure... Spammers tend to post through spambots scattered around the Web. in any case, Most people have dynamic IP addresses with their ISP. Blocking IPs or a range of IPs is likely to affect other users of the same ISP.

[Forrest]

I'm not so sure... Spammers tend to post through spambots scattered around the Web.

Forums like this use a captcha which means it's real people going through and creating accounts. From my experience moderating and running several forums, the forum spammers tend to come from very specific IP blocks.

in any case, Most people have dynamic IP addresses with their ISP. Blocking IPs or a range of IPs is likely to affect other users of the same ISP.

Also from experience, we have yet to find a single valid user that came from the IP ranges the forum spammers come from.

[Forrest]

Got another one of these personal message spams.

[Forrest]

And another.

[John Stalberg]

I've just got that one and yesterday I got another one. An invitation to download free videos from a site, ipodfilms_com. Don't see how they are related but they almost have to be since they turn up within a day, breaking several months of silence in my pm inbox. Actually they are the first pm's I've got here.

[Clytie]

I've had three of those messages today. They're a dratted nuisance, especially when you have your prefs set to popup new private messages and/or notify you via email about new private messages.

Is there anything the forum admins can do about this? Perhaps disallow private messaging for a user until they've posted once? Or is there a better way?

I don't think it's reasonable to expect the users to cope with this individually. Surely it's more effective to confront it here.

Edit: my husband (sysop at our local ISP) says what works for him with phpBB, is either deleting these people as soon as they sign up (if they are few), or (if they are many) simply disallow registration for a while, or require admin approval for registration for a while, which bogs them and gives you a chance to vacuum them out.

[pheski]

I have also received 3 of these in the last 24 hours or so, also my first PMs since I've been a member here (a couple years).

I hope the admins can keep this from continuing.

Peter Elias

[TommyW]

I've received both of those PMs. Two for ipodfilms.

[Chiller]

4 for me. Same contacts as everyone else. Also one hawking their website "zuneempire.net". I did not think that Zune lovers would be posting in the OmniGroup's forum. Seems very unlikely. My 2 cents.

[Josy91]

I received one (IPBoy) some days ago too. Have now restricted PM rights to my "buddies". It was quite a shock. Thought that private forums couldn't be touched by spam (particularly by private messages). :-/

[Clytie]

Got another one today, from "wealthprovider" or something similar, which would trip any basic spam filter.

[TommyW]

Yep... same here.

[Forrest]

More PM spam today.

Can something please be done about this? I don't really care what it is just as long as it cuts down on spam. I get more PM spam here than all other forums I visit combined (which is a lot of forums.)

[Brian]

The only fix I know of is to forbid folks with fewer than <some number> of posts under their belt from sending private messages at all. I hesitate to take steps that might cut off legitimate use of forum features, but I'm persuadable.

I'll try setting it to one post and see if that makes a difference. If not, we'll crank it higher.

[Brian]

Okay, the change has been made. If disaster strikes, please let me know.

[Forrest]

Thanks. (adding more words so I can actually just post "thanks")