Spam posts

[-hanko]

No system is perfect and never will be. Offshore hackers/spammers make big bucks getting by the walls put up and hopefully we have smart enough people on here to report them and smart enough Mods to take them out as they are found and reported. we can help cut it down but at what point do you tip the scales in favor of biased censorship versus freedom of speech? it is a slippery slope and who defines "spam"? it is a no win argument. Just keep reporting and knocking them off the site.

I'd saying we're all reporting and mods here are busily deleting. But sometimes that's more like a finger in the dike v. stemming the tide.

Not sure what other mods do on other forums run with vb software, but once again, freedom of speech a la' the First Amendment is not guaranteed on the internet. Spam is easy to define...posts having clearly nothing to do with business here, including OT business.

[dustoff31]

No system is perfect and never will be. Offshore hackers/spammers make big bucks getting by the walls put up and hopefully we have smart enough people on here to report them and smart enough Mods to take them out as they are found and reported. we can help cut it down but at what point do you tip the scales in favor of biased censorship versus freedom of speech? it is a slippery slope and who defines "spam"? it is a no win argument. Just keep reporting and knocking them off the site.

If we liken this board to our homes or private property, that question is easily answered.

There simply is no right to free speech here, especially when uninvited. The property owner defines what spam is and at what point he or she determines it is unwanted.

That is totally a win situation. We win.

[G.F.C.]

Is it possible that people's accounts are being hacked and hijacked like basically every single yahoo mail account ever?

[vintagearms]

"Busy" is subjective. You want busy? Check arfcom. I've been there since started. No spam. Granted, not vbulletin.

arf.com requires a valid non-free email account from a major isp. Plus, they actually look at everyone who tries to join and monitors their posts for awhile.

[-hanko]

arf.com requires a valid non-free email account from a major isp. Plus, they actually look at everyone who tries to join and monitors their posts for awhile.

So are you saying that more mods are needed here??

I've had a free gmail email address since 2004, no issues with arfcom whatsoever.

[Garv]

I've had a free gmail email address since 2004, no issues with arfcom whatsoever.

Might be a more recent change.

I cannot register using my gmail account.

They have a disclosure about this in the register screen.

[TRAP55]

Not sufficient - join dates of a week before posting spam are common (same-day is by far the most common) and I've banned a few this month with 3 or 4 week earlier join dates.

But, since same-day is the bulk, that might help.

Librarian, I haven't used the v bulletin software, but in phpbb software, if you click on the user name and "administrate user" it'll show where the IP is coming from, and you can ban the IP on the the forum, or if it's coming from some spam hellhole like Nigeria, you can ban the whole IP block on the server side.
Do the same with bots and spiders, the most prolific right now are yandex from Russia, and Baidu from China. Both are using Microsoft and Google bots now too.
It's a never ending battle, right when you find something that ruins their day, they'll come up with something new a week later. I've fought this battle for more than a decade on the MauserCentral forums. The "comment spammers" you're getting swamped with here are easy to nuke. Want some help, PM me.

[Librarian]

From what I've read (I'm not a vb admin, so I don't know how this all works) IP banning only works on those too lazy to to spoof their IPs. That's some of them, of course.

[Cody]

Gotta be a better game to play other than whack-a-mole.

There is. Banning AFTER the post is a "band aid" fix. A better way is to make it so their first post must be "approved" by an admin before it is visible to the public. Once this gets put into place you'll see the number of spammers start to decrease because their posts never become public so they move on to other forums. Right now they are winning because their posts show up and stick around for a while before getting reported, then finally deleted. Stopping the posts will stop the spammers.

[Milsurps]

There has to be a way to verify the goodness of a new members...this is the only vbulletin forum I've visited that has the spam that calguns.net has.

How do other forums check on fng's to avoid spam?

CG runs a pretty old version of vbulletin. I believe Kes said one time that upgrading to a newer version would be painful at best.
So here we are...

[WartHog]

Now the Bastidges are copying the Subject line of legitimate posts that have been previously made and reposting with their Spam links in the body of the post.

[Red-Osier]

Now the Bastidges are copying the Subject line of legitimate posts that have been previously made and reposting with their Spam links in the body of the post.

Sneaky bastids

[ZirconJohn]

Build a WALL ...!

[socal147]

If there were a solution that could be readily implemented, the spammers would be gone. Sadly, this is not the case. Calguns suffers ...

[user120312]

So, have they put the link in the title so when you go to report it....

Member groups are a potent solution but it takes someone with root access to set the flags.

If CG has an anti-spam panel in place with a spam IP database subscription, that will IME help too. It shows up on the mods user control panel page, lower left.

As it is, it's one way to tell one has a popular forum. Congrats.