Forums >Technical Support>Why are we being overrun by spambots lately?
Runners run
E.J.Greater Lowell Road RunnersCry havoc and let slip the dawgs of war!May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be always at your back, may the sun shine warm upon your SPF30, may the rains fall soft upon your sweat-wicking hat, and until you hit the finish line may The Flying Spaghetti Monster hold you in the hollow of His Noodly Appendage.
Dave
I think Eric has been surfing Natalie Portman sites from the server. He's a very naughty boy.
That could have been so many of us.
Please don't blame Eric.
I ran a mile and I liked it, liked it, liked it. dgb2n@yahoo.com
I doubt if its Eric, but you have to blame someone and Eric's convenient.......JUST JOKING ERIC .....
He's definitely doing a good job of keeping this site clean......No easy task sometimes.....
Appreciate your efforts, and I appreciate Running Ahead Eric....
Champions are made when no one is watching
I don't know why there's a sudden uptick of spam lately. RA has been relatively immune to spam for various reasons, one of which I'm sure is its custom forum. It's not worth the spammer's time to write a spambot just for one site.
All of the recent spams appear to be manually entered, which is good. I looked at the spammers' info and found something suspicious. There are some 120 accounts originated from the same subnet/24. All of them are created over a span of 6 months. Most of these accounts are not active. I wonder if the spammers were laying the ground works for the future.
I'm not sure what I can do to prevent these spams without affecting legitimate users. Thoughts?
Not sure there is much you can do about manual spammers.
So long as you're keeping the real spambots out, it may be all you can do.
I don't know what can be done on the technical side, Eric.
But you have done the best thing a leader can do: created loyalty built on your genuine care for the site. Many of us know you literally work around the clock on this site, so you have many loyal eyes watching with you.
"If you have the fire, run..." -John Climacus
Good Bad & The Monkey
I'm running somewhere tomorrow. It's going to be beautiful. I can't wait.
Poor baby
All of the recent spams appear to be manually entered, which is good. I looked at the spammers' info and found something suspicious. There are some 120 accounts originated from the same subnet/24. All of them are created over a span of 6 months. Most of these accounts are not active. I wonder if the spammers were laying the ground works for the future. I'm not sure what I can do to prevent these spams without affecting legitimate users. Thoughts?
Maybe delete inactive(= without a traininglog ) users after a while, say 3 months. It is not a 100% solution, but it might help against the manually entered spam.
meh
My stupid little mobile-friendly treadmill calculator
Tying posting privileges to log activity, for example, could restrict some of the most valuable forum participants such as Nobby, or others who visit less often but still make valuable contributions. Pete Magill regularly links to RunningAhead threads and likely sends some very knowledgeable traffic this way who probably don't log their miles here.
If the admins have the capacity, just deleting the spam posts and banning the e-mail address associated with the users may be sufficient. If RA makes it inconvenient enough, there are plenty of other sites the spammers can post where they won't face censure.
The process is the goal.
Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, and create a monster they call Destiny.
True. And many of those with logs actually bring down the overall quality of the discussions here. Like me, for example...
Quantity is the new quality.
I've got a fever...
+1 We don't want to lose those kind of quality posts just because of a little spam.
On your deathbed, you won't wish that you'd spent more time at the office. But you will wish that you'd spent more time running. Because if you had, you wouldn't be on your deathbed.
As Mr. H and Jeff said, any automated schemes will either not work because these are not bots, or will end up hassling real users. The best I can do for now is censor the topics as they're created.
All of the recent spams are from two parties (one in Israel and the other in Netherlands) so I blocked their IPs. We'll see how long before they figure that out.