Comments on: p2pnet comment spams

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 03:12:07 +0000

Oh I forgot. My whole site only gets an average of 125 page views per day! Which 100 of that is the blog and 24 of that (minimum) are comment spammers!

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 03:09:04 +0000

Askimet got all but one. The one got put in the moderation queu for having more than 1 hyperlink in it. I don’t get many legit comments at all. 16 total in the full lifetime of the blog (March 2006). This may impact P2PNet because my weekly news comments posts have half of the comment blocks based on and linking to P2PNet articles.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 12:17:51 +0000

Jon, arent you a bit of parasite yourself?

- the united front for the spam community (UFSC)

see: UFSCnet.net for more information

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 07:46:10 +0000

How about, at most, a few days after the article disappears from the front page? At that point, no one is going to be reading comments, anyway, and no one (except spammers) posting.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 02:59:02 +0000

How about a time limit on posts? For example, any post newer than, say, 2 months past a story’s post date would be ignored and discared.

It won’t stop the spam, but maybe it will stop the spurious posts directed towards older stories.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 01:02:53 +0000

When the spammers figure out how to get around that, the next step is to disable automatic linking – which sometimes even creates live weblinks in error.

Also, to find all the existing spam posts, develop a script that will collect all the posts containing weblinks, then these can be looked at for deletion. The script can also be designed to find keywords commonly used by spammers.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 00:52:52 +0000

These spammers all post links, so the solution seems simple: reject any posts that have “http://” or “www.” in the post. So if the post contains obvious weblink components, it should get kicked back into “preview” mode. (which is preferable than losing someone’s post into the ether)

This should not be a big problem for most normal users – we can just say “Google.com” or “p2pnet.net” without giving the full link.

BTW: no solution you can possibly come up with will permanently stop spammers, but maybe it will give you a few moments of peace until the next cycle in this never-ending arms race.

Also, the text in P2Pnet’s images can easily be figured out with OCR methods that spam bots are now using. Better images now use distorted text that the bots can’t yet figure out.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 13:59:12 +0000

The only real spam that I have seen seems to be chinese, and they are using the chinese pictorial glyphs. Now that is unicode format, so what you can probably try to do is reject any post that contains characters outside the ascii range 32-126 which is basically every character that can be typed using just the normal key or with shift. That will put a stop to all chinese based spam since it is in chinese.

Furthermore, you can also drop any posts that contain html web links like Viagra. You could probably put a filter in place to scan the posts before they are posted too.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 09:34:04 +0000

Your security code image looks like it would be quite easy to read with some OCR software. Try breaking up the background a bit with a bold pattern. One thing I just thought of that I haven’t seen any one else do (which, I hope, means the spammers won’t have thought of it yet) is to make it an animated gif with a couple of different letters on each frame.

I know you can generate animated gifs automagically with imagemagick so there’s no reason why it couldn’t work.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 04:05:32 +0000

Jon, oftentimes it’s pretty easy to contain comment spam. A few ideas:

* Comment spammers tend to hit reply forms directly – check for the referrer and see if thy are actually coming from the article in question.

* Also stunningly effectful: measuring how long it takes someone to post a reply. If it takes less than, say, 10 seconds, there is a good chance he is a spammer. Or the comment isn’t worth posting anyway

* Only allow x comments per IP address per hour, or block IP addresses completely from commenting if they send too much.

* Captcha works too, of course – but I see you figured that ione out yourself

In the long run I would suggest to swtich to a more widely supported CMS. Most of them have comment spam solutions right out of the box nowadays.

Janko / http://www.p2p-blog.com

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:40:18 +0000

Some of these comment spams could be what are called Joe jobs. Joe jobs occure when someone sends out a bunch of spam advertising a victim’s website in order to cause problem for the operator.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 22:50:42 +0000

there still are weaknesses in the test; i’ll see what i can come up with to solve it.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 22:33:53 +0000

whoi cares?