Ghost reply notifications

[jal]

Quite often I get topic reply notifications via e-mail that link to topics that haven't been replied to in months. Osdev is the only forum I have this issue with, so what's triggering these notifications? Spam replies being deleted by moderators?


JAL

[Combuster]

You nailed it

[jal]

You nailed it :D

Sometimes being right is not necessarily fun :).


JAL

[neon]

Perhaps a forum mod to auto-lock a thread after a few months or so would solve this issue?

[JamesM]

It wouldn't, unfortunately - the spam gets sent to active topics only, seemingly.

[Combuster]

Plus, reviving relevant old threads is sometimes better than creating new ones. (although not everybody would agree on that).

[purage]

Do you think they submit spam by hand?

[Combuster]

Given the rumors, yes some might.

[purage]

You could probably make a word database that stars out certain words, like you would with curse words, except use them on paxil, viagra, etc and just keep adding new ones as you see them. You might re-code that feature to first lower case everything, so the comparison could be more precise, so that something simple like pAxIl wont make it through. This would also break any links with those words in it. Just an ideal; something to build on.

[Combuster]

*me loves the custom spamfilter for his website - no captcha involved - spam-free for over 4 months*

Shame that chase showed no attempt of copying parts of that...

[purage]

If your looking for a list of words, this looks promising: http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/interne ... d-list.htm

Found on Google using: spam words

Just hack up a quick script to parse the list and set them in the DB for you.

[chase]

Word banning doesn't work. You get to many false hits and it is to easy to get around. It only works on low volume sites and/or sites that aren't running commonly targeted software like phpBB. Word filters can work as part of a spam ranking system like SpamAssassin. I wish there was a good SpamAssassin plugin for phpBB.

I added an extra registration question so that should stop some of the bots (and the really stupid people). Used this mod: http://www.phpbb.com/mods/db/index.php? ... ib_id=3011

[purage]

It's the same question every time and it is presented as plain text rather than a dynamically created image. lol

[chase]

It's the same question every time and it is presented as plain text rather than a dynamically created image. lol

What do you do you think either one of those things would acheive? Captchas have been cracked by most bots and the question just needs to be unique enough that it isn't shared across so many phpbb forums that bots add code for it.

[Troy Martin]

You could take it a step further and make it octal, just to make it different/harder.