Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, bacon, eggs, and spam

The forum spam is really getting a bit out of hand. Maybe newly registered first posts should be held for moderation?

Comments

  • During the current SPAM storm, could the Subject line be changed to eliminate irrelevant information and display the necessary component only?

    Everything up to the colon on the current Subject line is mostly useless information and is the portion of the Subject that gets displayed in a browser or client. Get rid of that up front mostly useless information and leave what now comes after the colon.

    That would immediately show that a particular email is SPAM without having to click it.

  • ^ That's a very good idea,
    as it is now, also prevents email clients from sorting mails to conversations.
    Or even myself from manual sorting overview.
    As we also get notifications for each single new post vs once per thread.

  • I'd bet that an IP analysis of the spam source would show that prudent use of firewall rules to nuke all traffic from certain IP's would clean this up a lot.

    That along with using a challenge / response mechanism would eliminate 99.9% of spam.

    Most SPAM sources don't accept inbound mail and even if they did, they probably wouldn't know what to do in a challenge / response scenario.

    If every inbound email to the forum were compared against a list of known good email addresses, then only those get through.

    To get on the list of known good email addresses requires the FIRST email from an unknown address to be challenged to reply to a standardized notification message sent by the forum to the unknown email address. Only when that email address replies to the challenge message is the original email sent through AND that email address is now considered good.

    If the spam site won't accept inbound mail the challenge never makes it and therefore no reply is possible. After a certain amount of time, the initiating spam email is trashed and the IP address of now a known spam engine is added to the list of no contact IP's in the firewall. If the spam site does accept email, it won't know what to reply because these sites are automated and can't follow instructions in the challenge email.

    Only a SPAM human being can possibly get around this challenge / response mechanism because a person CAN respond to the challenge, but he'd only get one spam through before an administrator adds his IP to the firewall.

    I used this mechanism for years via the TMDA protocol under Qmail.

  • Steven_g
    edited October 2019

    Whenever I am looking at new software, one of the first things I do is check to see if it has a forum, this tells me quite a lot.
    Is a program popular ie. regular posts and quick response. But also does it appear to be professional.
    Spam is something everyone has to deal with, the fact that it gets through is a poor reflection on the professionalism of a site, the fact that it can stay there for extended periods of time is even poorer (there are spam posts on here right at this moment from 4 days ago). All the new innovations in the BricsCAD program are really impressive, how the forum appears is much less so. Admin, please take a look at this through the eyes of prospective new customers, and maybe consider spending a bit of time applying some resources here, it would be a worthwhile investment.

  • We will make sure the registration procedure is stricter to avoid bots registering and posting on our forum.

  • Thanks Sander !
    SPAM got really massive the last weeks.

  • You might need to tighten this up a bit more, 3 posts about Mortgage brokers all 3 first time posters?

  • Yes.
    But looks like these are sleeping accounts that were registered
    already before the new stricter gate keeping.

    I'm confident they will disappear over time.

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