Lots of spammers lately.

[Rob Tucker]

Not sure if it is just the season or if some new spamming effort is underway..... but Punaweb is getting spammed pretty regularly lately. It's now a daily chore to weed them out.

The Captcha safeguard (entering a skewed series of numbers and letters at registration) has worked pretty well at keeping out bots for the last couple years. So I am left to assume that the current wave of spammers are real humans somewhere wasting their time (and mine) spamming a tiny venue like Punaweb.

Do any of our members with more internet experience than I have thoughts to add on the subject?

Are these human spammers or bots?

Are there better ways to combat them?

[birdmove]

I am quite sure I know less about internet issues than you, Rob. But I do know that some forums that one has to register on use the letter/number sequence that you have to copy to join that is so hard to make out that, in a few cases, I had to give up trying to join.

Jon in Keaau/HPP

[kalakoa]

Whether these spammers are humans or bots is mostly irrelevant; at the edges of the net, these things converge in strange ways. Example: CAPCHA decoding can be hired from Nowheristan for pennies/each; some of the body text is probably written by humans, but there's probably not quite enough CPC to pay humans to post.

Filtering: my suggestion involves scoring posts based on AS-path and account history -- while users from Russia are technically "plausible", they are also somewhat "unlikely". Linguistic analysis would make a good secondary filter. Checking the registration details of any domain that appears in a URL would also help.

Goal of these spammers is to get their URL into a search engine, so there's some value in "selective content", basically set the bar higher for US users, but show all posts to non-US users. This will do interesting things to the search results.

[mailes]

Maybe try a 'task' validation; 3plus7=?

With so many States accepting marijuana the Mexican market is bound to dry up and $.03 per could add up.

eta: A few weeks ago I watched a PBS special on a Biologist earning $25.00 a month in Cuba; snails are her specialty.

100 pennies in a $1

2,500 in $25

That's only 833 forum breaks a month.

Add .01 per post, very profitable.