[Forrest]

I mod/admin a few forums. One of the ways we have found to thwart spammers is to block specific IP ranges. We found that the spammers typically originate from one specific country, so we blocked all IPs that resolved to that country. We also put up a message so that if a legit user came from one of the blocked ranges, they would know who to contact to get whitelisted. Thus far, we haven't had a single spammer go through the steps to be whitelisted.

I'm not sure if the OG has been tracking IPs of spammers, but if they haven't it would be nice if they would and see if they can find a pattern in the IPs of spammers.

[TommyW]

That can also offend people... Nationality can be a tricky one...

There must be software like Akismet on Wordpress that can address this issue.

[Forrest]

Originally Posted by TommyW

That can also offend people... Nationality can be a tricky one...

There must be software like Akismet on Wordpress that can address this issue.

We did some searching before we pulled the trigger. We ha no valid users from that country and 99% of our spam posts came from that country.

If country is too broad, they can narrow it down to specific netblock owners.

As far as being offended, that's the choice the person being blocked. It's rather common for certain web sites or services to be blocked based on country.

By looking at the stats, it should be easy to tell if the OG has the same problem I've seen elsewhere. They can tell if a range block is going to help the 99.99% of their current forum users, or harm potential users.

[Brian]

Ummm... either I just sent my response as a private message to forrest, or the forum ate my post. In any case... This is a good idea - we've also kicked around the idea of switching to a 'prove you're a human being' system that's harder to crack through automation.

In general, though, the plans are on hold until our new sysadmin starts and gets up to speed. So it'll be a bit, but we definitely want to improve this. If nothing else, it sucks that I've made "de-spam the forums" a part of my morning coffee routine. =(

[Forrest]

Thanks Brian. I didn't get a PM.

I don't have the IPs of the people who have been spamming, so I can only make a guess based on what I've seen elsewhere. It's certainly something the OG would have to see if it applies to them.

I don't know if vB offers it, but one of the anti-spam systems we've implemented on other sites is reverse captcha. It prevents automated spammers while also hindering manual spammers who use auto-fill to save time.

[Ilgaz]

If you say "hmm Turkish IPs send spam" and block Turkish net block, I am not getting here.

There is hardly anyone sitting and spamming forums manually anymore. There are organised spam bots , infected machines dubbed as "zombies" and lets say if 100 turkish infected machines spamming this forum, 1 guy being Omni customer (me) will get effected.

Enable CAPTCHA instead.

IP (block) ban, if not feed from an open, reasonable RBL such as open proxy list, it is extremely risky and may cause harm to Omni groups image forever.

Here is how to ban open proxies from getting account/posting:
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=248252


I have been a spamcop.net user since its start and don't let me tell the worst spammers on earth. Americans with infected machines having huge upspeed, Korea and recently Poland. Who are you banning for what reason? 10 spammers?

I maintain a movie actors official site and I had horrible spam from certain countries. Let me ban these blocks? What did the real fan of him do to be treated like that? Even if it is single person?

I love the P2P support idea such as forums, IRC etc. but it has one major risk. Free support people alienate end users and hit the product/company image while developers has nothing to do with it. Don't let so called "supporters" decide what to do for a commercial company.

If I didn't know Omni Group and I wasn't registered, if I went to forums wondering about products and introduced a page accusing my IP block of spamming, I would say "racists" and move along. Sorry to speak too open but there is no better way to explain the horrible risk of IP block banning.

Last year, Gizmo project which is opensource,standards based telephony application got hit by horrible accusations since their genius company banned certain countries from calling because of fraud. The project was doomed. The download numbers dropped significantly.

Also let me add how I became an Omni group customer. I downloaded Omniweb while I was a Mac newbie, I noticed something in Encoding menu, Turkish while being ISO-8859-9 (latin based) language was grouped with Arabic, I politely sent feedback about it saying it may offend some people and when I got a reply like 1 hour later, I said this is the company to buy products for.

[jem]

Originally Posted by Forrest

We found that the spammers typically originate from one specific country, so we blocked all IPs that resolved to that country

Isn't that USA? :D (Or is it email only)

[Forrest]

Please at least review the IP address of poster 080522jk and see where it's at and if it compares to other posters or spammers.

[ranjeet]

cfBlockCountry (Plugin)is really nice solution to block any country to access without using ip address.one of my friend asked me to use this.For example if you want to block access of the site from any IP in United States you can use this plugin. I have used this to prevent unwanted access to my website and you can also use this if going through the same problem . you will definitely feel better after using this. you can download it from the given link below:-http://www.codefire.in/open-source.html