It seems that now spammers posts message
regarding the nes too.
Since that message from that new user (christineb1979), it felt fishy. Small message, just say "source code" and word "nes". It could have been some beginners that doesn't know how to ask things but just by the user name... I'm sorry to be too judgmental but with such a niche group, the chance that a user called that way is serious is quite low. And usually beginners just create their own threads so they can get more attention on that specific subject. My "heuristic" didn't fail me about spammers recently.
So what is the next step then to prevent link spam or any other kind of spam? Now content about the nes or code is not enough to be not classed as a spammer unless the content is quite specific about the issue (i.e. I want nes code is not specific). It's seems such an innocent mail but now that message will be indexed in search engines and nobody would have noticed at all unless someone else posted in that thread.
Do new users need to pass through ReCaptcha yet?
The spammers in question are human beings, commonly located in India or the Philippines (read: cheap labour regions). In the case of the referenced post, the individual came from a Philippines network.
These are actual companies with employees which traverse forums and other social environments, making accounts manually and then using advertising links in their posts -- or, they sell the username/password to a highest bidder who then uses it for nefarious purposes (usually spamming).
This whole "market" exists because of captchas -- it defeats their purpose entirely since the employees all speak English (which is also why/how they're able to post something that sounds "relevant" to the forum at hand).
On the Moderators section of this board, we (well, I) have been gradually banning all of of the network blocks as posts like the above arise. They have a *lot* of netblocks, solely due to the shady nature of their companies, so it takes time.
The only way to solve this problem is to turn the forum into register-only mode (meaning every new account made requires a human to review the application and accept or deny/ignore it) -- you know, like effectively what was done with the Wiki.
Welcome to the Internet in 2010.
The internet in 2010 sucks. Boooooooo. I'm just saying. ;-)
Maybe require all users to click on three screenshots of NES games which contain Mario out of 9 images. And of course you warp the images too.
What part of "these people read, write, and speak English" don't you understand? :D
Maybe Dwedit is a bot who doesn't read, write, and speak English.
Hi, i was at once in the greatness city for my Free Job where i enjoyed much of online gambling as it was very rewarding.
I was often specified that more than once i thought, though i loved the mountains and tried eagerly to affect the time in which, i was mislead into sad times. When my free job turned out to be so much more, i was fulfilled.
All agree with my free online job?
Free jobs for all, and jobs for free. I am interested in online gambling and i free jobs!
Feel free to talk sometimes with me, i will fill you in.
Apologies to tr1p1ea for plagiarizing his fake spam.
CATS: All your base are belong to us. You are on the way to destruction.
Captain:
Mmm, what you say !!
tepples wrote:
CATS: All your base are belong to us. You are on the way to destruction.!![/url]
Someone set us up the bomb!
By the Way, The spammers are temporarily gone, So for now ther is no need to implent a new layer of protection!
That is all!
Dwedit wrote:
Hi, i was at once in ...
This got me to LOL. :D Also made me think of "Free Steve Jobs!", and
Hey Mon; how many jobs you got? Only one job?
I agree with , l hate spam!
[Three shopping links removed by MOD. Was this intended as irony?]
jonahlinn wrote:
I agree with , l hate spam!
I'll admit, this one actually made me laugh.
MOUAHAHAHAHAHA
Now we have smappers talking about spam.
So f**** retarded.
Yeah. They have a sense of humor too! (...) Made me laugh. Especially when you read the topic reason and that this spammer is the second time he came to the board (same avatar image twice).
My board also got hit by a spammer with that avatar.
Krebs on Security is running a
story about captchabot.com, the CAPTCHA-solving service used by one of the biggest spambotnets.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was easier for a computer to read a captcha to what is an human. I usually need a lot of tries to pass these things. Of course if there is human spammers this isn't going to do anything about them.
Computers have an easier time than humans at optical character recognition, but only if the glyphs are separated. That's why modern visual CAPTCHAs draw various geometry over the words, such as an XOR'd ellipse, and they push the
letter spacing closer, so that the glyphs overlap.