Post by Admin on Oct 19, 2023 10:12:23 GMT -5
We have had a recent uptick in spam bots. That's now six so far, four of them in the last twelve hours. A member suggested that we ban their IP but the first three were totally different IPs. The fourth was from the same as the third, but then the fifth was a different IP altogether again. The sixth was from the same IP as the fifth. They could come in using a thousand totally different IPs, which would make blocking their IPs ineffective. I did, however, block the two repeat IP addresses. That won't do anything about the new IPs that they will come from. They look to keep advertising the same site, so I've added it to the automatic word filter list. Now any reference to that site should be replaced with the word "spam."
I apologize for spam bots but they're a problem all over the internet on boards and social media and they're probably not going anywhere any time soon. On Facebook I followed local news networks and their articles almost always ended up with several different spam bot accounts replying with the same crappy ads. It was so prevalent that those news networks seemed to just give up on fighting them. We will keep banning them but we don't know of a way to stop them in advance, unless we go to all memberships needing to be approved. At this time, we don't want to chase off potential new members by delaying and complicating the process of joining our little community.
I apologize for spam bots but they're a problem all over the internet on boards and social media and they're probably not going anywhere any time soon. On Facebook I followed local news networks and their articles almost always ended up with several different spam bot accounts replying with the same crappy ads. It was so prevalent that those news networks seemed to just give up on fighting them. We will keep banning them but we don't know of a way to stop them in advance, unless we go to all memberships needing to be approved. At this time, we don't want to chase off potential new members by delaying and complicating the process of joining our little community.
