Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! 28 members online 24 are listed 4 are then hidden of the 24, i recognize kat, read and quad that leaves 21 all are spammers good going sci
and 10 minutes later.... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! 4 lines of spammers pathetic!
I could go visible... Would break up the spammer line.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I hear brick walls are good listeners. Seriously though, we are stuck with those spammers appearing as live while utilising the software without any hacks or alterations. Personally I did try on my own experimental board a hack some time back. Simply put you create a folder with a .htaccess "DENY" list. The list has to be rewritten from the database for Banned IP's and Canonical domains. When a "banned" member attempts to login, rather than getting the default template with the ban message (Which does consume bandwidth) they are instead pointed to a "gateway" that doesn't exist within the folder that has the .htaccess file. The spammer just gets a 401 header rather than an actual page being sent, this thereby saves bandwidth for legitimate logins. It can be rigged to only handle ex-members that are in the SPAMMER usergroup rather than BANNED members.(incase they are only temporary) It's something I personally would have implemented however it's not my site, it's something that you'd have to petition for and that could take a while.
Well the problem is with "Banned" spammer bots that just idle like Zombie servers. Most of them can't actually post anything because they are already banned however they might alter their homepage or interests etc to try and manipulate search engine entries about their various spammer sites. The banned page is actually far less than it use to be and unfortunately it's not created by a CRON event to my knowledge, it's actually rebuilt every load. All these things might seem trivial but they all add up in the end. An anecdote of this is when this site use to allow signatures many years ago. I used a freeserver that gave 10Gb per month in bandwidth where I hosted one small less than 35kb image in my signature. The problem was that every post I made would have the signature in and in long threads where I'd replied a number of times meant that the image was loaded multiple times. [Obviously browser cache's have got more advanced since then] I was finding that within about 2 weeks of the month I was consuming all 10Gb of bandwidth which meant the server would automatically cut off the images from loading. This was just caused by the pageloads from users, search engines, robots and spammers. (Spammers were less back then) This expressed both the popularity of the site and the problem with signatures. To my knowledge it was one of the things that got the signatures and in house hosted images stopped on the site. (Bandwidth was always a premium.)
Something for Gustav: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/sciforums.com According to Alexa one of the highest sort out words other than "Science" and "Windows XP" that are used to find sciforums is "Pokemon", Another rather unusual factoid is apparently sciforums is rated 719th in Bosnia and Herzegovina. So all the sciforums members that usually rant here are potentially household names. (or not) So according to a wikitravel entry: Zdravo. (ZDRAH-voh) or Merhaba (MEHR-hah bah)
Speaking of banned list, only real members should be listed, who actually posted something other then spam....
That could be easily done, It would just require a members "Group" to alter based upon specific stat's. For instance If 0-20 posts, New Member group. New member group can then have specific settings rigged like "Not appearing on the Online" section of the forum, not allowing links to be inserted, not allowing PM's etc. It might however be seen as Draconian by some.
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This is the second time I've mentioned this suggestion, and now that it has been confirmed that the ban list is created real time, it seems to make even more sense. (At least to me). Modify the "WHERE" part of the SQL statement to list only those records in the "banned" table where the word "spam" is not included in the ban reason. If you want to get fancy, use regex. Either way, someone with access to VBulletin's source should be able to make this change in a matter of minutes, with little to no danger of adverse, unintended consequences. :shrug:
Why do you want to see who was banned last year? Sure it may be interesting at the moment but as time goes by. plus most likely the only record they have of spammers.
John, the point here is to eliminate the faux users, created expressly for the purpose of spamming, from appearing on the ban list. This is not the same as eliminating the record from the database. Do you even understand the difference between a maintaining a record and displaying / reporting it? The more apropos question would be "John, why do you want to see all those who are banned for spamming?" Hmmm?
Well, back when I was a mod (before the FBI found me) I checked suspect IP addresses on the Ban List for previously-banned spammers. It's a quick way of checking: if they're already listed (regardless of name) then they got banned before they posted.
That is THE record of banned users. I doubt there is another. Sure they can delete the user but then that user would no longer be banned and their name would not be on the list. A bit counterproductive dont you think, Rand?
Even better. The query that the Mods use would access the entire table, but the report (display) for general users would be limited to those banned for reasons other than spamming. It may not be a perfect solution, but it would take next to no extra processing ticks and still leave the records intact for other purposes. Am I missing something?
Geez,John. For the record, once again, I am not talking about altering, adding to, or subtracting from the table in which banned records are kept. I am simply advocating changing the SQL query which displays a given subset of those records. This seems to be a concept which you entirely fail to grasp, although for some reason that doesn't surprise me. Unless you are totally familiar with DB's, records, fields, reports / displays and the SQL behind creating such, including the differences therein, you are totally unqualified to offer responses on this topic. Hush now...
Possibly. As far as I was aware (and I'm quite willing to admit to ignorance on this) the Ban List - as seen by everyone - was the only resource I had. Maybe there is (or could be) a full list for mod use/ limited for others, but if there already is I haven't seen/ used it.
