Another Spam Attack - and upcoming actions

[Robbie]

There's a BUNCH of spam PMs from a BUNCH of users...I think they're compromised accounts...

I have turned off private messaging temporarily. If all goes well private messaging will return tomorrow or Monday...but I'm not comfortable turning it back on until the spam problem is solved.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

[Redrobes]

Let me know if there is anything I can do script wise to help out. I use one to grab errors from the error log and format up htaccess entries which get tacked on. Ok it bins some legit attempts to join that screwed up but it culls the spam bots severely.

[RobA]

Good luck, Robbie.

Spammers are a pain in the butt. On my home site blog I ended up having to block trackbacks at the firewall, not because they were getting them through (very good spam prevention in the blog software I use), but because the spam catching/processing was killing by CPU

-Rob A>

[NeonKnight]

Best of luck in eliminating the annoyances of the Web!

[Robbie]

Thanks to a nice healthy discussion on the vbulletin forums I think I got it under control. All the affected users were banned and I've deleted all their sent pms.

I've also set up a new permission system that I'll be turning on momentarily.

Whats going to happen is that all the Registered Users on the site with more than 5 posts will be promoted to the Guild Members group.

These two groups are identical except for the fact that registered users cannot send private messages.

If there ever happens to be any other forms of spam such as spam posts, then I'll make their first 5 posts require moderator approval before they appear on the site. This is definitely going to help cull the problem...BUT, there may be some minor permissions issues that pop up...and if anyone sees anything wrong, please PM me when PMS are turned back on.

Thank you all for your patience, and again I apologize for the inconvenience.

Redrobes...thanks for the offer for assistance. There's a php script that was posted to the vbulletin forum that searches the user base and randomly changes all the passwords of users who's passwords = username...but I'd like to modify it to only create a list of said users instead of randomly assigning their password. Know enoough about php to help me with that? If not, I'll try to work through it...but its lower priority at the moment since I seem to have it under control.

[Robbie]

Ok, its done...private messaging has been turned back on...BUT...the registered users group does not have access to it.

As soon as the site runs its regularly scheduled maintenance routines (every hour) it should make a mass promotion...promoting all users with more than 5 posts to the Guild Members group, and allowing private messages again.

I'll make a post here when I see for sure that that has happened.

All members of additional groups (such as industry pros and CLs and whatnot...should already have their private messaging system back...but I'm not sure)

[töff]

grr@spamrz

Captcha's a pain, even if we are helping clean up book scans. But, what what must be done, must be done.

[Redrobes]

Redrobes...thanks for the offer for assistance. There's a php script that was posted to the vbulletin forum that searches the user base and randomly changes all the passwords of users who's passwords = username...but I'd like to modify it to only create a list of said users instead of randomly assigning their password. Know enoough about php to help me with that? If not, I'll try to work through it...but its lower priority at the moment since I seem to have it under control.

I could take a look. I haven't done PHP (and I don't do SQL either) but I know its a lot like html with embedded scripting and all scripty languages seem similar to me. Can you email it over ?

[RobA]

I've done a fair bit of PHP, you can toss it my way if you wish.

-Rob A>