Jedi Gandalf bans him.

Seriously though, what's with the surge of spambots lately?

Good question, I spent a few minutes cleaning up the music, interactive story, and showcase forums this morning...

We've been getting probably a few spam messages a week for the past couple years, not everyone notices though because the admins usually clean it up pretty quickly. So far, just the actions of an administrator deleting the posts and banning the account have been enough to keep it at bay without the community becoming overly annoyed. VBulletin has a built in feature that allows you to remove all the posts from one user and ban them at the same time, so taking care of it isn't too hard.

Yeah, I've had to keep a closer eye on the ISB lately because of the spam attacks. Thank you, DS and mb and the other admin/mods for helping clean the ISB up when I haven't gotten to it yet!

They're my minions. Nothing will stop them from selling you discounted handbags and NFL jerseys at extremely reasonable prices.

He's back, and seems to be making fun of the admins.

Is site traffic up recently? More traffic = higher site ranking on google/alexa = more audience for spammers = more spammers show up

And another one, I don't get it. There must be some profit involved if they are taking the time to this, but this such a small community and I doubt anyone is buying ****ty chinese knockoff crap here.

One potential option would be to close registration to new users. Those wishing to create an account would have to email an admin, and the admin would create the account for them.

Unless the registration page reflected this change (essentially spelling out the registration process into e-mailing the admin), I would say that this is a bad idea. I realize we're not much of a community to just get random new people, but nor do I think the spam situation is that dire at this point to warrant such a change.

It would reflect that change... the instructions would be quite clear so that a real human could easily see what needs to be done to register.

I agree that it's not really necessary. From our point of view (the admins) banning a spambot and deleting all their posts only takes a couple of clicks of the mouse.

Having to register via email seems like a bad idea for at least two reasons: I can't speak for all potential new members, but I know I hate having to register for websites, and if I had to do it via email which would be even more of a nuisance, I most likely wouldn't bother. The other reason is that contacting Massassi admins (or level uploaders) via email seems like it's been a wasted effort for years now, I haven't tried but this is my impression from some posts on these forums and messages in the chat over the years.

On the other hand it's a good idea because it's so extremely uncommon that we get any actual new members who participate in discussions, and you don't need to register if you just want to lurk.

Or just subtly tweak the registration page so that it no longer fits the standard vBulletin page. Humans wouldn't notice, bots would be completely confused and would be unable to complete the process.

I think it's amusing to see what threads these bots drag up from the past.

They totally bombed the ISB this morning.

Yesterday, Jan 23rd, 2010 - a date which will live in infamy - the Massassi Temple Interactive Story Board was suddenly and deliberately attacked by spam from the botnet....

no monks here *******

Hahahaha that's hilarious, a spambot posted in this thread!

True, but remember the threads they make show up in search engines like google and yahoo. And you don't need to be logged in or even have an account to view threads. So when Frank Nonmassassian is doing research on the internet for an inexpensive laptop, he punches it into google and ends up here. If Mr. Nonmassassian is unwise to the ways of the internet (which he likely is) and if the spambot is especially clever, Mr. Nonmassassian will think that the thread was created by a legitimate member of this community, with the intention of providing helpful advice to the community. He will therefore follow up on the links posted in the thread.

On the other hand, this scenario is highly unlikely on Massassi, as our admins usually do a good job of pulling that **** down before anyone (besides a few community members here and there) even see it.

We sure do!

fellow jemsters

Hi guys (I'm still here unbelievably (if you even remember me :P))

On one site I administer, which is practically dead compared to here, we started getting dozens of spams per day. I ended up adding a line of code to the forum scripts and a box to the registration page that forced new users to enter a code found on the main site. Works wonders and our members don't have any problems using it. Only had one spam post since and that was a human who was paid to do it, had a nice chat with him before I finally banned him.
However we use phpBB3 so not sure how easy it would be to do that here.

We've got another one!

We've already tried a system that's more complicated than that. These aren't really bots at all. They're even dodging IP bans by using either a botnet or TOR, cause I've seen the same account logged in under 3 extremely different IPs.