A new sort of spam

[Pink Dragonfly]

When viewing Who's Online, I saw that there was several guests viewing various user profiles with very dubious sounding names, such as YU TUBE SEKS PORNO GALERI, just to mention one of many. When I click on that user profile, they don't actually post anything but they have a huge link to a porn site as part of their signature. It would appear that these guests have been directed from other places and PS is acting as an involuntary parasite host. Using google I found such a link on an obviously spammed debate page of the Danish equivalent of BBC together with other pornlinks. I find this very disconcerting. Just going through the Who's Online, I found quite a number of these spam user profiles, some created quite a while back. (I have obviously written to PJ about this).

At present, I can't see any means of reporting a bad user, only a bad post or a bad photo. This would be a useful option, but I think this really should make us rethink the registration procedure.

Mette

[Frog]

Good observation. I seldom drop down to the who's here part as I generally just click ;new posts' and try to catch up.
I don't know what to do about it either. I can't even remember if there is an approval required to join or if one just signs up but if there is an approval, I'd thin a name like that would be easy to reject.
No idea what the average number of sign ups there are either.

[Photo-John]

It's not new. It's just hard to catch. Whenever I see questionable account names on the Who's Online list, I go check them out. But I have to see them. Anyway, this was a great catch, Mette. I ended up banning a bunch of accounts, deleting the signatures from a whole bunch, and I also banned two e-mail domains and a root IP. In all, I probably ended up blocking 15 to 20 spam accounts.

Thanks!

[Pink Dragonfly]

I was only looking because I just discovered the Who's Online page yesterday :blush2: thanks to A.M.D.A: and I got somewhat perplexed.

Do the userprofiles actually get deleted? I also saw various guests viewing a profile called Lesbi where I think the signature had been removed or something, it said banished. But somewhere out there, there's obviously still links to this userprofile. Could we have a "report user" option, that would make it easier for both us and you, PJ? But I think the only way to go is some sort of approval procedure as suggested by Frog and also in the other spam thread.

Mette

[Photo-John]

The banned profiles do not get deleted. If they did, someone else could register them. And as long as the signatures are removed, I feel ok about leaving the profiles. Even though they are accessible, they're pretty buried and it's not likely someone is going to accidentally stumble on them. As for an approval process, that would be way too time consuming. Anything that adds new work and doesn't add new content isn't gonna happen. Spam is just a part of life on the Web. The best way to deal with it is to report it, as you've done, and try to look for patterns so we can ban en masse.

[Pink Dragonfly]

it's not likely someone is going to accidentally stumble on them

This is what I'm not so sure about! As I said, I found a link to a user profile on a Danish news debate page - but I guess it doesn't matter if there's no further link to be found, and hey, people may actually discover what a great site PR is, since they are here anyway

But could we please have a report user option on the profiles, that would be a lot easier than writing PM's to you? Especially when there's more than one.

And may I suggest that we all keep our eyes open and once in a while take a look at what our guests are viewing. Normal spam is bad enough, but porn spam is by far the worst IMHO

Mette

[Frog]

Thanks for the report, Mette and thanks for the quick work, John

[Theodore]

John- a snowboarding forum that is also V-bulletin based uses a small questionnaire while registering

It says "Which of the following is a snowboard brand" and gives 3 real brands and 2 bogus ones. Perhaps you could do that with camera brands in the registration process?