New type of spam
 

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

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 :-(

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.

I just got it too.

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 :-\

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.

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.

[QUOTE=Cortig;29912]I'm not so sure... Spammers tend to post through spambots scattered around the Web.[/quote]

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.

[quote] 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.[/QUOTE]

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

Got another one of these personal message spams.

And another.

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.