Spam users
 ).
The best advice I can offer is not to click on anyone's homepage (ESPECIALLY if they have a number at the end of their name) for a day or two after they've joined -- that gives me a chance to check them out and delete them if necessary. |
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| Thank you Ron! I haven't seen any of these.........must be due to your excellent caretaking.
If I wasn't such a lady I'd curse all spammers to Hell! |
| Thank you Ron. Again and again you are not told enough how great of a job you are doing! This forum is so well orginized and well maintaned. Kudos over and over |
| Well, this topic is kinda like "SPAM users", so I thought I'd post it here and save another "Announcement" at the top of the page.
oes.org has been under attack. It's nothing personal you see, it's just that we're such a vibrant community that we have a lot of listings highly ranked in Google, and the attackers are looking for phpBB bulletin boards that are not secure. The forum was unavailable for a short time on 12/24/2004 as there were so many attackers from all over the world checking our defenses all at once the system became overloaded. At least one member noticed that there were alot of unregistered guests on the forum --at one point there were 189 "visitors" within 5 minutes -- those were the attacking robots, and not real people. To put it in perspective, the forum normally sees visits from about 300-400 for an entire day. I had programmed the forum to handle up to 1100 visitors per hour, thinking that would be enough for right now. Hah! Just for the fun of it, I've increased it to 2500 per hour. Tell your friends! 
As always, rest assured that oes.org is well patched and as secure as anything on the public net can be, and no damage was done and no information was stolen, or anything like that. The attacks continue at this time. However, I have diverted them from ever reaching the forum. In order to do this, I have had to shut off one feature of the board, the feature that highlights your search terms when you look at a post that you've found by doing a search. It's the highlighting feature that the probers were going after, so by examining each request sent to the forum to see if it includes a highlighting request, I can decide to allow the request to come to the forum or to reject it. If you're really bored, you can try the defenses out for yourself here: http://forum.oes.org/viewtopic.php?highlight=wigglebutt This was a relatively easy fix. If the attacks continue, I will implement a more complex fix that will allow the return of the highlighting code. Merry Christmas! |
| Good Job Ron!
I am glad we didn't lose the forum for very long.... 
That's like going without coffee!!! (for a caffiene addict like myself, that is VERY bad) LOL |
| The attacks across the world continue, but so far we're still here!
At this time, highlighting is still not allowed. I haven't found a truly effective way of eliminating the problem while still allowing access. I'll keep you posted. As the attacks change and evolve, I am constantly ensuring that oes.org is up-to-date in it's software protections, and I am also making changes to the program that is helping to protect oes.org's bandwidth. If you notice strange behavior in oes.org (I mean other than my strange behavior  ) please drop me a note through the PM system, or through normal email to webmaster@oes.org .
Thanks! |
Quote: (I mean other than my strange behavior )
ain't that the truth  |
| Hello again;
For the last two days, SPAMmers have been posting messages leading to adult websites. I have taken a step in perventing them from posting, however they are clever, so stuff may return. My advice and request to not encourage these folks is to PLEASE don't click on a link that looks like SPAM (posted anonymously (by someone not known, not by accident  ), unrelated to sheepies, etc.
Any clicks you make on these sites only encourages them. The links are tracked so they know where the hits came from... Thanks for the help. |
| Hello again...
I have had to make some changes to the "Session" code on the forum to accommodate Google's search robots. If you notice any weirdness (besides me) in the behavior of the forum, or have trouble posting, or staying logged in or anything like that, please let me know via PM or email. If you can't even login to do that, please drop me a line to Ron@oes.org Thanks! |
| Well those darn SPAMmers are at it again.
This time it's a robot (or "bot") that has been taking advantage of our "registration not needed to post" policy. I very much would like to keep that policy possible. In that vein, I have implemented a very small change. If you are not logged in when you try to post, the forum will require that you check a little box before submitting the post. Now any smart bot writer could overcome this minor obstacle in a heartbeat -- it wouldn't be a challenge at all. However, I am guessing that this bot wasn't written specifically for SPAMming oes.org, and therefore they won't bother to take the time and re-write the bot just for our sake. Sorry for the inconvenience. The next step would be to implement more difficult tasks such as visual confirmation (requiring the poster to enter a code as seen in a graphic), but that would tend to block all legitimate AOL users from posting anonymously as a nasty side effect. Please let me know if you run into any difficulties, or if you have any questions. Currently, you will see the checkbox even if you are logged in, but you don't need to check it to post (checking it anyway won't hurt.). This may change soon, as I refine the code in the program. -Ron. PS as a possible NICE side effect, if you've forgotten to log in, this will give you a chance to copy your post to the clipboard (control-A, control-X), log in, and post under your username. Perhaps there will be fewer "accidents"! |
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