Revsoft forums reaches 30000 posts and a record-high TI forum activity

[DJ Omnimaga]

If I remember correctly, most bots are now manually registered on forums it seems. No matter how strong your anti spam filter is, they will still manually get through. once they signed up on enough website, then they spam automatically.

[Madskillz]

Well I went ahead and stopped new members from registering as well as any old members from posting or replying. It seemed Deathsting was getting pms from the bots. I also made it so they cant send pms to anybody either. So that will have to do until it can be deleted. I cleaned it out a bit and it dropped the number of topics by about 27000 and the members by at least 200. I had 40 pages of members waiting for a confirmation from the forum.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Good idea I guess. On this new SMF version, when deleting members I can choose to delete their posts all at once too, so it speeds up things, but that test board had so many bots o.o

Personally the reason I decided to do a fake news is really because of the extreme amount of spambots. That must be a record for sure. Plus it was funny that spambots could manage to make a TI board 3 times more active than the most active TI forums

[Madskillz]

Ha it's all good, that was a crazy amount of bots. Once it started affecting deathsting(bots where sending him pms) and it was affecting his email. I had to do something about it. So I cleared the connection to the server so the forum is visually gone from the web and no connections to the database should be able to occur. Thanks for the post though, because I am pretty sure this was causing an error with our hosting that I have been trying to track down for a while.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Wow really? o.o

Could it be due to us announcing it? Checking the Revsoft thread, it seems to have started happening right when we posted this fake news :O

That said it was  not our intention to trigger pm spam, tho, but on the old Omnimaga forums it happened before (bots spamming ppl via PM, usually nigerian scams) and on UTI it recently did too.

Because seriously, if bringning up this alt forum on Omnimaga triggered this much PM spam on it, that means there must be A LOT of spambots regularing browsing Omnimaga too. :O

[Madskillz]

Not sure if you guys triggered it, but its taken care of now. But you might have them lurking watching you guys.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah, I really think that the bots just followed the forum link through our front page. There are so many bots online, I wouldn't be surprised if this was why United-TI, TI-BANK, Omnimaga and Cemetech had so many guests online at once everytime.

[TIfanx1999]

Either that or we just have a ton of lurkers. I really wonder about that myself sometimes. Hey Lurkers! If you're out there, sign up and join the discussion!

[ztrumpet]

Either that or we just have a ton of lurkers. I really wonder about that myself sometimes. Hey Lurkers! If you're out there, sign up and join the discussion!

I was one of those for two or three months before I joined a calc site.  I took me that long to convince myself.

[DJ Omnimaga]

we could indeed have a lot of lurkers, because when I check the online list there are often people checking the TI-Nspire and GB emu threads

[TIfanx1999]

Ah, I remember that feature on the old board where you could check the activity of who was viewing the board. Didn't realize you could check it on this new one too.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah it is possible to enable this on IPB, PHPBB and SMF. I know some forums like UnsyntaxSoft have it disabled, though

[Madskillz]

Well I was cleaning out the email account that was associated with that old board and I found a rather interesting email:

This email address was created solely to register automatically at thousands of
forums for the purposes of spamming forums like yours. Remove my account and any
other account registered with my email address!
 
You should also consider making the password requirements for your forum much
more stringent.
 
Sincerely,
 
A Random Digilante Who Is Sick Of Forum Spammers From Russia

To the guy from Russia...your work doesnt go unnoticed. What a great idea.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Lol seems like a troll or hacker. He might have found about the lack of spam protection (such as the ability of registering with the same e-mail address twice) and might be who spammed the board

I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same person (or group of person) that spam other forums online (from a spamlist)

[mapar007]

Adds an "ethical" touch rofl. (Kinda funny how he first dishes out the damage, and then says the security sucks)