Forum text blacklist to combat spam

It might be an idea to add some filters for very short messages less than 5 words or even less than 10 words as well (related to one spam message posted today).

I do think it may have been discussed before, but the impact of the blacklist could be reduced for existing users by only applying it to newly created users which haven’t posted before…

You know there are a couple of other odd things that happen around the time the spammers hit. The forum either stops loading or brings up the heavy load page. Also when the spammer is logged in, they are listed twice as being logged in with the same user #.

The “heavy load” may be because the spambot is blindly trying every page on the site (some of which do take a long time to load) until it finds one that looks like a forum page. I have seen spammers logged-in before now but I haven’t seen the “dual login” effect: I’d guess it’s a short-lived phenomenon.

The spammers tend to hit at the same time daily, or thereabouts. It just happens to e about the time I usually check the forum. Quite often it’s totally unable to even respond. The rest of the site functions usually but the forum is dead.

When it is functioning and the spammer has dropped their payload, I have witnessed the dual login quite a few times. Today included. It is a phenomena which I have only witnessed with spammers. These two things have made me worry for a while that it’s not just a brute force attack on the web interface. It is however not my area. Just naive observations and a probably wrong idea.

Not sure if it’s applicable here, but I check registered eMail addresses against the Stop Forum Spam list, which filters out the vast majority of accounts before they’re activated.