VaTrailRider's first thread--comment about spammers

[VaTrailRider]

Hi,

Just wanted to say that it's nice to see this forum up and moving again! I first found it a couple of years ago when we were fighting with our small pool.......it kept turning a horrid tea color. Found a quick fix (Vitamin C powder) and the cause, and we had several years of pool fun. We've since built a new house and don't have a pool at the moment, but I have friends that do so I checked back in here occasionally. Nice to see it open for new registrants, since I could not give my heartfelt thanks back then.......so thanks for the help!

Now, about the spammers.....I understand you are trying to cut down on spammers, but it seems quite a time-consuming and somewhat complicated way you are going about it. I own a rather large forum, and I administrate on a HUGE computer tech forum, and neither of these forums have much of a problem with spammers. As you can imagine, the computer tech forum would draw in an ENORMOUS amount of spam, if any place would! vBulletin, which I see you are using here, has several add-ons that help with spam that are simple and easy to use. I use one that allows me to create my own questions and answers, allowing me to use more than one at a time, and I very rarely have any spammers get through, even though my questions are simple (yet forum-topic related). The one I administrate on has a different program that scans email address domains through a dynamic database for spammers.

At any rate, vBulletin has some nifty options, and I'd be happy to answer any questions or help with any information I have.

[PoolDoc]

I appreciate your thanks.

I understand your spam comments, but I'm not sure you have quite grasped the situation here.

The key error you, and many well-meaning prior commentators have made, is in misunderstanding the role demographics plays in the way modern professional spammers target forums. Your comment about spammers targeting tech forums is revealing, and somewhat naive.

Users here are affluent, very active on the Internet, and much more likely than average to bank online BUT they are often older and LESS technically sophisticated than the average person with equal net access and are naive with respect to online scams. If you've lurked here much, surely you realize how very naive and gullible some of my users are?

By contrast, tech forum users are only average in income but are younger and MUCH more technically sophisticated and much more likely to keep Flash updated and use tools like NoScript on Firefox to protect themselves.

If you were a spammer or link hacker, which target would you select? Affluent and naive, or average and guarded?

That same lack of sophistication affects what tools I can use here. If I ran Linuxforums, I could ask "which distro Volkerding owns?" or "which was is the oldest distro still being developed?" and just about everyone there could answer. But many of the questions I could use here, that would work for both 20 year old single moms with an Intex and 45 year old bond traders with a weekend home in upstate New York . . . can also be handled by Xrumer.

There have been some tools for vB, and I haven't tried them all. I'll readily admit I don't know everything vB can do, especially in this current flavor. (The state of vB documentation, as you probably know, totally sucks!) But the best tool, BadBehavior, only recently became available again for vB. I was hoping to install it the week the tornadoes hit . . . and I haven't had time since.

Still there is another factor.

Traffic here is more than most people -- including Alexa -- realize. And it's up a bunch. (Apparently, some of the spammers do know -- many of the spam attempts lately have been by SEO hired guns.) We have an ENORMOUS number of lurkers. To put it plainly, we (my moderators and I) couldn't handle the posts we'd get if registration here was as easy as possible.

If I open PF up all the way, it would be a lot bigger. But it wouldn't be PF any more, either.

Sincerely

Ben Powell



PS. It's true, I'm paranoid about security. I try to damp it down, and have, somewhat.

Still, I find it discouraging when people offer help without taking the time to understand the situation here. It's sorta like the guy, who last season authoritatively offered detailed and quite pointed suggestions on how I could cut my hosting costs . . . all based on his experience running a forum that handled about 6 or 7% of the traffic PF was handling at that time. I need help in this area, but I've quit asking, because virtually all the the responses I've gotten in the past miss the mark so widely.

[VaTrailRider]

The key error you, and many well-meaning prior commentators have made, is in misunderstanding the role demographics plays in the way modern professional spammers target forums. Your comment about spammers targeting tech forums is revealing, and somewhat naive.

Users here are affluent, very active on the Internet, and much more likely than average to bank online BUT they are often older and LESS technically sophisticated than the average person with equal net access and are naive with respect to online scams. If you've lurked here much, surely you realize how very naive and gullible some of my users are?

Just so you know......here is the tech forum I was talking about:

http://forums.techguy.org/

As you can see if you browse through there a bit, many many of the people there have barely enough knowledge to turn on their computer........it's why they come to us. Because they need help because they don't know what to do with a computer and have either messed it up badly themselves, or have been scammed or have horrible malware on their computers. So, because of the questions that are posted on our site, we have many spammers and scammers targeting our forums, plus, we have, several times, been specifically targeted ourselves for DDOS attacks from these people precisely because we help prevent those types of things and help clean up computers and help those that don't know how to use a computer. As a matter of fact, the majority of our users (according to profile information) are older people (over the age of forty).

Traffic here is more than most people -- including Alexa -- realize. And it's up a bunch. (Apparently, some of the spammers do know -- many of the spam attempts lately have been by SEO hired guns.) We have an ENORMOUS number of lurkers. ........6 or 7% of the traffic PF was handling at that time. I need help in this area, but I've quit asking, because virtually all the the responses I've gotten in the past miss the mark so widely.

As you can see, the forum I was referring is so large that PF itself would be maybe 6 or 7% of it's traffic. Our forums are actually running on six servers now, just to handle the traffic. As I type, there are 3,679 active users,.....and it's a slow night.

Well, back to the spam topic, here is what we use on the tech site:

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=248042

I take it, however, from your response that you don't wish to have any further suggestions or help in this from lil ol' me, so I'll not discourage you any further with my naivete regarding spam and forums and stick to posting about pools.

Have a great night.

[PoolDoc]

I stand corrected.

Your forum is WAY higher traffic than this one. OTOH, it still means what works for you, won't necessarily work for me.

The vB add-on is one I'd missed -- it looked interesting.

The rest of my response I'll send by email. I don't want to discuss it here for a variety of reasons.

Ben