TheRadioBoard

Hi Friends,
Another spammer is history here. Here are things to remember.

1. These spammers come from anywhere, but mostly from China lately.

2. They just cut and paste their spam as desire by the people that hire them.
This is just their job, nothing else.

3. They likely don't speak English. They also don't look for replies to their posts.
So posting a reply doesn't do anything, except to make more work for me
to remove your post as I remove the offending poster.

4. These posters work while I am sleeping. I don't get to this board until about
9am Eastern US Time. Since I am the only one with the power to remove
spam, you all are going to have to wait until I get up.

5. I look at EVERY post on the RadioBoard.

6. I sign into the RadioBoard at least 10 times a day for a look around. No
one takes better care of a board than I do.

7. As a reminder, you will see spam before I am around to kill it. First, don't
worry. It is my problem and I will take care of it. Second, if you see a link
associated with the spam post, DO NOT CLICK on the link! Bad things could
happen to your computer, especially if you don't employ protections. This
is a mean world and people want to hurt you.

8. The only way I can prevent spam is to not allow any more people sign up
to this forum. However, that would cause the forum to eventually die. That
is something that none of us want. Having a spammer come on once or twice
per week is a small price to pay.

9. Please don't tell me about the spam, unless it is up over 24 hours. Of
course you might want to check up on me as it might indicate that I have
fallen and can't get up or something like that. Nothing keeps me from the
RadioBoard!

Dave

_________________
Please visit my website at: http://www.makearadio.com

Thanks, Dave

Your diligence is commendable. Good work!

Rich

_________________
Homebrew Radio ex-Silicon Valley

no beef from me Dave--
those creeps are just part of living these days--only way to defeat 'em completely is to turn off the machine--

GOOD JOB--

jerry--k5psh

_________________
TB
In GOD we trust,
all others we monitor!

Good job Dave and Thank You for maintaining "the best" radio website on the net!

I'll second that!

Whenever I see a spam post, I know Darth Vader Schmarder will be along shortly to zap 'em.

Thanks for all the work you do on the RadioBoard Dave! We sure do enjoy it!

73, Dan

The IP ban force is with me!

Dave

_________________
Please visit my website at: http://www.makearadio.com

Dave,

Let ALL the good forces be with you!

Lots of appreciation, in all directions, here!

Mike

_________________
I like the K-I-S-S Principle: "Keep It Sane & Simple"
http://www.peeblesoriginals.com

Many other boards on which I participate have been "massively spammed" according to each respective admin. One BB admin mentioned "40 attempts per minute" ... sounds pretty awful.

Was wondering, out of curiosity, what volume you are seeing on this BB?

I can't say how many attempts are made because of the extra hurdle that
I put in the sign in section. This disrupts the autobot and the sign up fails.

The spammers are signing in manually and can get over the hurdle. That is
where I come in. Much of the spam sign ins come in while I sleep. If they
post before I kill the account, I am able to find the IP address. Then I look
it up and find the entire range for that ISP. I then ban the entire range of
that ISP. Of course, they can use a proxy and keep doing it, but I think that
when they see that I am watching, they go somewhere else.

5 years ago, before I put up the hurdle, I was getting several spammers a
day. I almost shut this board down, until I found the hack to trip up the
autobots.

I had one account recently hijacked and the spammer seeded 40 of the
posts with spam links. I had to manually go to each post and remove the spam.

I aim to keep this board as clean and safe as possible.

Best wishes,
Dave

_________________
Please visit my website at: http://www.makearadio.com

Users can help by choosing strong passwords. I suspect the owner of the hijacked account did not and someone figured it out. At the bottom of the home page you'll see a large number of "guests" visiting the board. Some of them are robots trying to crack the sign-up process, others are trying to crack your password. Use your search engine to find sites that will generate strong passwords. Sixteen alphanumeric characters (with upper- and lowercase letters) isn't too many anymore, and throwing in a few punctuation characters is even better. I know Dave puts in a lot of time fending off these cretins. Thanks, Dave!

73,

_________________

http://kr1s.kearman.com/
http://qrp.kearman.com/

There's a couple of ways to reduce the "hammering" from 'bots or manual hack attacks:

1) Monitor IP and user name. If you get more than than 3 failed attempts for a given user name, lock that user + IP out for 15 min. (IP is optional)

2) After 3 consecutive failed attempts for a given user name, add a processing delay of X seconds to each successive attempt (X is in the range of 10 to 20 seconds). The added friction slows them down.

#1 is more thorough, #2 is a bit more friendly to real users.

Be sure to log failed login attempts, and trigger a notification if you see an inordinate amount of fails for specific IDs.

Hi Kenn,
Not sure how to do all that on this board. I just do the whack a mole thing
and dump them out one at a time.

-----------------------

Also to all the others that e-mailed me about the spam:
Please don't do that, unless the spam is there for more than 24 hours, I monitor
this board a dozen times a day, but I have to take some time out to eat, sleep,
go shopping, and occasionally take a shower (when ordered by the health dept.)

When you send me all the PM's, that is more work that I have to do to access
the messages, read and answer them. I would rather spend the time working
on the spammers. It takes lots of operations to ban the IP, delete all the
messages and do the research.

Dave

_________________
Please visit my website at: http://www.makearadio.com

Monitoring the logs for spammers is time consuming. On my sites I use .htaccess to block the IPs of persistent pests. Dave, blocking an ISP's entire range can block innocent folks, too. I used to do that until I realized I was going to end up denying access to half of Europe.

73,

_________________

http://kr1s.kearman.com/
http://qrp.kearman.com/