zoemarry

spambots are getting smarter

Agreed, and you do quick work. The spam bots need to pass a turing test so they can start running and plaing in skype games. I'd forgive the occasional break for commerciaal if they had good roleplaying.

I jump in my car to escape the security bots.

You jump behind the wheel of your Jet Black Honda Fit. It's ergonomic controls give you a +2 to your driving and the sport tuned suspension allows you to easily maneuver away from the bots. You settle into the conformable contoured seats and breath a sign of relief confidant in the knowledge that even in the unlikely event of the bots catching up with you you have the added safety of the side impact air bags that came standard.

onlynewsky

ZibragagFak

I'll put money on "get backlinks" being a bot.

Holy Fucktard of Epic Spamishseinque ... tigari-electronicejp is hitting multiple threads, multiple times and if it's a bot or something, this is going to cause some serious problems.

Seeing two, three, or more of his posts in long dead threads has me a little worried.

Not all that many problems. Nuke the account and all posts by it, maybe blackhole the IP address, and maybe notify the service provider it's coming from that they've got spammers on their network that they need to deal with.

McNutcase laid out how we deal with spam.

1. Nuke the account - Yes
2. Delete all the posts by it - Yes, I can delete all the posts made by any account with a few simple clicks. I did this with a certain mumbling bear at his request a few months back.
3. Blackhole the IP address - Yes, we ban all spam bots by their IP address
4. Notify their ISP - No, while we can get the ISP data of all of the users the vast majority of the spam bots are from former soviet bloc countries and we feel their ISPs are pretty much set up to run spammers.

We also subscribe to an spam blocking list that aggregates a huge amount of known spammers and bots by their IP, users names, email, etc. The wave of spam almost shut the forums down until we subbed to this list. Now the spam levels are just a minor annoyance.

Christian Griffen was asking about a similar spam solution on G+ this weekend—apparently Berengad Games' forum got so hammered with spam they had to basically blow it away. Which list do you use and what phpbb plugin (if any)to manage it? I'll pass that on to him.