About spambots

Post by **Fiye** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 8:12 pm

Holy sh*t!

That New-Nickname one is really working it >,>

[edit by Shirai]

I removed my own first post on accident trying to edit >.<
Below the edited version.

Hello everyone,

When meeting these posts please follow the following instructions:
-Do not click any links!!
A lot of these links direct you to a website that will install a trojan on your computer that sends out personal data which can differ between your bank and credit card data to having your MMO account stolen.
I'm serious, do not click any of those links ever.

-Stay away from posts which you do not trust!
Some spammers post not-safe-for-work content.
And yes I mean porn!

-Feel free to report these posts to Shirai.
I'll try to remove every spampost on sight, but even then even I can miss a post sometimes.
If you find anything, feel free to report it to me.

Post by **Shirai** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 10:37 pm

Yep, just cleaned up everything.

Post by **Tivia** » Sat Aug 23, 2008 8:05 pm

He is posting again.

On that note, can you forward me his IP so I can preemptively Ban him off all of my forums?

Post by **Ambrey** » Sat Aug 23, 2008 11:54 pm

I think he just launched a Blitzkrieg

Post by **Shirai** » Sun Aug 24, 2008 10:21 am

@Tiv

IPs forwarded, check your PM box.
Definitely using several (hacked?) computers to do this.

@Ambrey

He's been going on for a while, all I can do is delete the posts on sight until one of the site owners contacts me.

Post by **Tivia** » Sun Aug 24, 2008 2:52 pm

Thanks much,

And holy freaking crap. I have seen spammers before but man this guy is trying to get his quota's all on one website.

Post by **Ambrey** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 3:10 am

I wish there was something I could do to help Shirai but until one of the site's admins gets a hold of you I think your on your own. Unless a new mithrapride site is created and members are moved there.

Post by **Tivia** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 3:45 am

Hmm, are the Admins even taking care of this site anymore? If not I would be willing to integrate mithrapride into my network. I could either move mithrapride.org over if the Admins wanted, or I know who has mithrapride.com and I am pretty confident I could get it. Now I will say though all of my network forums are run on Vbulletin so it would be a change. However they are a good bit more secure and I have very little trouble with major spamming like this. Just tossing it out there in the event that fyre/gold don't want to deal with managing this anymore.

Post by **Shirai** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 6:22 am

As much as I'd hate to say it.

The website has been without any maintainance for almost 2 years.
Having someone taking over MP might not be a bad idea if the founders are ok with it.

ScarlettPheonix · Post by **ScarlettPheonix** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 12:29 pm

Personally, I think it might be a good idea if its ok with everyone. I've known that Fye/Goldess haven't been on the boards for awhile but I didn't realize that there hasn't been any maintenance at all for that long

Post by **Alya Mizar (Tsybil)** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 3:13 pm

/blinks

I had no idea we were cut adrift like that.

As far as Mr. spam central goes, can't his IP addresses get blocked? Or is that an admin function?

Fire and Goldy world transfered off Midgard some time ago. They hadn't been heard from for a bit before the transfer, and not much after it.

Post by **Shirai** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 5:15 pm

Tsybil wrote: As far as Mr. spam central goes, can't his IP addresses get blocked? Or is that an admin function?

Unfortunately that is an admin function.
Something I do not have access to.
Aside from that it's a botnetwork built out of what I assume would be pc's infected by a trojan designed to spam so the posts come from several IP adresses.
So banning one IP or range wouldn't help too much.

Aside from that, the way moderation has been implemented I am severely limited to just deleting, editing and moving posts.
If I could lock up entire forums I might be able to contain the spam.
But now I have to go all over the place to see if I haven't missed anything...

ScarlettPhoenix wrote:Personally, I think it might be a good idea if its ok with everyone. I've known that Fye/Goldess haven't been on the boards for awhile but I didn't realize that there hasn't been any maintenance at all for that long

As I said before, The only person doing a bit of maintainance on these forums which is litterally cleaning spam garbage and making sure the rules were followed was me.

Aside from Goldess and Firemyst I have tried to contact the other site admins months ago already without any reply.
The spamming has been going on for a long time, however only now it really is starting to escalate into a full scale spamwar.

Also when I entered the #Mithrapride IRC channel this weekend to try and contact Goldess the channel topic basicly already gave away that they had declared Mithrapride dead.
So I'm not sure if there will be any help from that side.

However I personally haven't declared this site dead yet.
And still I am cleaning up the garbage in hope help comes.
But I have to admit, that hope is starting to fade...

Anyway, cleaning up the new mess..

Post by **Alya Mizar (Tsybil)** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 6:53 pm

Thanks Shirai.

/big hugs

Tianshii · Post by **Tianshii** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 12:21 am

Thank you for your ongoing efforts & not abandoning us!

On my ls forum, you have to be approved by a site admin before you can post anything anywhere besides "applications", which works out pretty good. We've only had a couple issues.

Post by **Sugami** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 8:56 am

They're attacking again D:

Post by **Tivia** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 4:37 pm

Well I will continue to watch this a bit, and go from there. Clearly I don't want to step on any toes on trying to take over the forum. I am just trying to help nothing more. In the interim, I will at least query and see if I can get mithrapride.com or better yet will see if I can have my dns guy try and contact the owner of .org directly.

Post by **Shirai** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 9:19 pm

Tivia wrote:Well I will continue to watch this a bit, and go from there. Clearly I don't want to step on any toes on trying to take over the forum. I am just trying to help nothing more. In the interim, I will at least query and see if I can get mithrapride.com or better yet will see if I can have my dns guy try and contact the owner of .org directly.

Cool, whatever works out, works out.
Thanks a lot for the effort from my side, seriously.

Post by **Ambrey** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 10:48 pm

It just surprises me that the owner of this website is obviously still paying for this site yet he or she doesn't even check on it once in a while?

Post by **Tivia** » Wed Aug 27, 2008 1:20 am

Well not so surprising to me. I know I buy my domain's for years at a time, also most are on auto renew and just charge to the card without me doing a thing or even remembering most of the time.

Post by **Fiye** » Wed Aug 27, 2008 4:46 am

Yeah, last thing you want to have happen is to lose your domain and have some ass hat steal it from you ^^;

Post by **Shirai** » Wed Aug 27, 2008 9:18 am

Ambrey wrote:It just surprises me that the owner of this website is obviously still paying for this site yet he or she doesn't even check on it once in a while?

Well fact being that many ffxi related sites still use MP's Vana'diel clock.
That one doesn't really require a lot of maintainance.

And the sites using them aren't small fry either.

Post by **Fiye** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 6:54 pm

*sigh*

Wish ya could just IP lock the guy.

Post by **Sugami** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 8:40 pm

Made like 10 topics D:

Post by **Shirai** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 10:53 pm

Sugami wrote:Made like 10 topics D:

You can 10 fold that, but no worries.
I've done my cleaning round.

Post by **Sugami** » Fri Aug 29, 2008 11:28 am

It's the same one, again and again D: does it keep recreating the account?

Post by **Shirai** » Fri Aug 29, 2008 12:52 pm

No, I cannot ban the account.
I'm only a moderator, not an admin.

All I can do is delete the spam, which gets worse by the hour............

[edit]
Spam deleted, for now...

Post by **Tivia** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 12:34 am

Update:

No luck at getting ahold of the current owner. He does not have his info listed so I put in a request for contact with his dns. It is just a wait and see thing currently.

Post by **Fiye** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 7:56 am

Shirai, just rename this thread "General Kitty Thread (Spam free!)"

Can't do anything else really.

Post by **Shirai** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 8:27 am

As long as I am in charge of these forums they will be cleaned.

Kintrra · Post by **Kintrra** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 8:40 pm

Sorry for my inattention, I've been mostly out of FFXI for the past couple months (burnt out for a while, to put it short) Goldess I know moved to Alexander before I moved off of it for a bit. I just moved back, I'll see if I can contact her or Fire in-game.

EDIT: I cleaned up the Alexander forums, but unfortunately that's all I can do as well.