Spam Email List

Post by **millipede** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 9:47 am

Post by **millipede** » Sat Aug 21, 2010 12:03 pm

Moved this to a different section and made it a sticky so I can find it easier as I add new emails.
I wish these spammers would be more useful with their time.

Post by **millipede** » Wed Nov 17, 2010 9:31 am

silly spammers. It's funny that some of them take the time to choose a random forum and make a post of all sorts of information... they TRY to make it look like a legitimate post (but fail miserably) just so they can leave links in their signature.

Good bye spammers. You don't have a home here.

Post by **jsebean** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 6:44 pm

from experience of running multiple Discussion Boards, I'm 99% sure all of the spammers you get are bots. There are thousands upon thousands of spam bots crawling the web out there, and when the find a website that isn't that "secure" (referring to spam prevention methods), they register and automatically post the spam message, or in their signature, etc. So yes, they do choose a random forum, but if they are actually able to register it means your board probably doesn't have a secure captcha (ok not probably, for sure

)

Its good that you're posting a list of email addresses above, but in reality, that'll really do no good for anyone, not even this site. Banning emails and IPs are basically a waste of time since spam bots just pick up a new email and a new proxy server, then away the go spamming like before. Also, if you ban IPs you may even end up banning legit members that actually want to join (i've seen many people do that before on other boards and think there's a bug when they get emails from people saying they're banned when they didnt think they banned them.). There is a post on the official phpBB website (since I see you're using phpBB

) that goes more in depth of this.

when i first started my phpBB website I use to get almost 15 spam bot registrations a day :O ... there is however, some things you can do to prevent spam. I'll post a few things here for what I did. Now, I don't get any spam at all on my board since I've done this, and I've helped a lot of other website owners to prevent spam on their phpBB board.

1. Upgrade your phpBB installation if you havent already. The newest version of phpBB not only has better spam prevention features, but there are a lot of security holes in the old versions that could even result into you site being hacked if you don't upgrade :O (and yes i've dealt with a hacked website, not fun

) The latest version to date (Nov 21, 2010) is phpBB 3.0.8.

2. Once you've upgraded also look into some spam prevention methods. There is a post on phpBB but I actually went on my own and tried to figure a method out myself. One of the spam prevention methods is to make the Captcha stronger, and "Custom Profile Fields". None of these methods were very "appealing" to me since a stronger captcha is harder to read (for me anyway), and Custom Profile fields are just annoying. There was a mod called "daroPL_AntiSpam" which works in the background. A human wouldn't notice the difference with this mod, but it really messes the spam bots up. I use it on my site and since I have installed it, got rid of all the spam on my site. I would suggest this mod to anyone running a board and has trouble with spam bots. More "technical" info and download is at http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/daropl_antispam/

That's basically all I've done to prevent spam. Hope its helpful, and if anyone, the admin on this board or anyone else, wants some help when it comes to spam prevention on phpBB, feel free to send me a PM

Hope this helps

Post by **millipede** » Mon Nov 22, 2010 9:19 am

Thanks for the info... especially the bit about the newest version coming out yesterday. I was up to date until then. Now I have some work to do today... but I always keep it up to date.
Banning emails helps a little... Some of those emails get used repeatedly and the same people do come back. There was one person(a few actually) that would hit the PYA with slightly altered email addresses over and over again. By the way they posted, the messages, and the email address, I could tell it would be the same person. So I ended up banning certain variations of their email address. It is handy when you can use the * symbol for wildcards. I also ended up banning ALL .ru and similar email domains entirely. We were getting TONS of spam from such email domains and absolutely no legitimate members from them.

The latest phpBB is usually helpful. The PYA is still running on an older version. I've been trying to get that updated but I've given up on asking the owner about it.
Here on this site, I'm sure it's possible that bots can get in on occasion but most of the spammers that hit here are humans. Most spam bots hit the first(top) forum they find. Most of the spam that hits here(which fortunately isn't very often) picks random sections. Sometimes they even try to type up something that is at least a little related to this site. There's someone in Canada that keeps posting something from a garden site or something like that. I forget. But they always post in the landscaping section which is on topic.

though it might not do much, one of the reasons I post a list of spam addresses here is so that other people can find them AND so if they're active email addresses(most probably aren't) those people too will get spam.

I gave up on banning IPs(though I used to do that a lot) for a couple reasons. One, like you mentioned, it could block legitimate users. The other, just too much work. At one point I was ready to ban ALL of China, Russia, and a few other countries from the pya.

Well, got things to do... including updating. If the site is down at all today you'll know why.

Post by **millipede** » Mon Nov 22, 2010 9:27 am

oh, and speaking of hacked sites... the other day I noticed a friend on facebook had some Norton program for facebook. It scanned links in their feed to see if any were bad. On my friend's wall it said that a link to my site had a warning. So I went to their site and typed in the url for this site and it mentioned two pages that were considered drive by downloads. I looked, and I had pages on my site FULL of links to all sorts of places. I had never seen those pages and have no idea where they came from.
I logged in to my hosting service and deleted all the offending pages. Then changed my password for Cpanel. I contacted my host. They looked at the logs and couldn't find anything to help figure out where those pages came from. They said next time to leave the pages and contact them. I sure hope there isn't a next time though.
I'm really frustrated that my site ended up with pages that I was unaware of and that I don't know how they got there. But fortunately it was just a couple of random pages that were hard to find and not the whole site taken over or something.

Post by **jsebean** » Mon Nov 22, 2010 9:37 am

yes, make sure all of your scripts are up to date, like phpBB, any mods, and any other scripts you have running on the site. Also disable flash posting on phpBB if its enabled too since thats a security risk. If you do that, then any hacking means they either figured out your password or its the hosts fault.

Post by **jsebean** » Mon Nov 22, 2010 9:53 am

this is a list on a website (http://www.stopforumspam.com) that has a lot of email addresses and IPs listed, but like before it takes a lot of time to ban ips and stuff and pretty much useless. I haven't banned any email addresses on my board, so far so good?

I have had human spammers but one ban and they moved on. If you continue to get human spam you can report it to the ISP if they're a real mess to deal with, but most people don't bother doing that anyway.

Logs might have had whoever hacked it, but if the "hacked" pages were on the site for a long time, the logs get overwritten now and then (depends on how long the host keeps them) so by the time you saw it, it might have been too late?

the .ru is more than likely spam bots, and spam bots will choose a random forum section, not always the top one (they're sneaky

)

and without the mod i mentioned above, the captchas that come with phpBB are pretty much all "broke" when it comes to spam bots in general, modifing the GD Captcha helps, but without the mod, the best captcha to use is reCaptcha from google (it's free

)

I haven't seen any spam myself so all good

Post by **jsebean** » Sun Nov 28, 2010 6:06 pm

instead of banning ips and such, i recently noticed a feature that is included in phpBB called DNS Blacklist. Its under the general tab in Security settings. When you enable it, it checks a list of IPs that are reported spammers, if it is positive, it blocks that "bot" (or even human spammer) from registering. There is a mod called Advanced Bock Mod that uses this feature but works better than the one included in phpBB. I'm not sure if it checks email address too? but it checks ips. It works on select hosts though.

Post by **millipede** » Sun Dec 05, 2010 8:32 pm

I hate spam. I don't get them often but still can't stand them. got one the other day, addressed to someone else. I was going to add their address here but I investigated it a bit. The ip was from China but the host that the domain was on was for a site that could very well be a legitimate business in California..... So I'm thinking, they didn't really send it from that address.
Oh well.......
Most of the time I wonder, what's the point of it all... but, if there's that much spam out there, that many people doing it... then someone out there is naive enough to click the links. I mean, if they didn't make some business would it really be worth the effort?
I say this a lot but, why can't these people be more productive with their time? I mean, if they put that much effort into dishonest business... imagine what they could do if they applied themselves in a more productive way.

Backyard Fellowship

Spam Email List

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Spam Email List

Interests

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Interests

honors

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Interests

honors

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Interests

honors

Re: Spam Email List

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Re: Spam Email List

Re: Spam Email List

Interests

honors

Re: Spam Email List