User registration enabled again [EDIT by Shade]

[Creavion]

User Registration is enabled again! Read my post for further Information: http://www.ut99.org/viewtopic.php?p=27282&f=1#p27282
Edit by Shade
________________________________________

Dear community,

at the moment we have some - obvious - problems with spambots. Not only we from the staff, also some other users mentioned such issues.

It seems requiered to fix those security leaks as soon as possible. This has to be done by the site admin with full rights (shade) since the site staff is a team of moderators and not stupid "spam bot deletion idiots". Nobody of us want to delete more spam posts as to read real user content. Although we have possibilities to take care of variuos situations we dont have the full rights and maybe even more important; the requiered knowledge or time.

For this reason it was sadly requiered to deactivate the "User registration" until shade takes care of this all.

Regards,
The Site Staff

[>@tack!<]

Yeah yesterday or sth i saw 0 new posts then 1 hour later 29 new posts wtf

[FraGnBraG]

yeah all the same kinda internet buy drugs online spaam you get in gmail, msn etc... nasty!

[Myth]

It's not just this website.
I think there is a bug in the forum software ut99.org is using.
Some hacker probably released some tools for script kiddies to use.

But it's just a hunch.
I've got nothing to prove anything.

If you still have the original spam posts you can enter them in Google and Google might spew up other websites with the same spam on websites that use the same forum software.

But staying on topic, this should be fixed ASAP anyway so that registration can open again.

[Feralidragon]

Shade, try this:
http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore

It works effectivelly, trust me.

[[did]Madis]

Captcha is dumb and annoying, especially recaptcha which is ridiculously simple to get around of. Just update your forum code and it'll be fine.

[JackGriffin]

I'm not sure of the permissions allowed of the admins but the easiest way to deal with this is allow a couple of the trusted people access to full account deletion. You can try what you want on the front-end but many sites now employ human registration so you just simply cannot stop it all.

My forum is very small but with three other people able to:
1. Select User
2. Delete User and Posts?
Bam. Done.

it's very simple to keep it clean. Don't make it super hard for people to register and post, you'll just lose members.

[GenMoKai]

Well the problem is that we had plenty of those users lately, we can delete all the things you say... but do that a couple of times a day is a bit to much for us (well at least me) The problem should be fixed first i think, before we open the registration agian. That would be better...

correct me if im wrong

[Feralidragon]

@JackGriffin: Well, like GenMoKai said, we had quite some of them (I deleted 3 of them in 5 minutes twice, and 1 of them in each time activelly posting, and more, some of them to drug stores, porn and whatnot, so yeah, it's that serious).

Captcha is dumb and annoying, especially recaptcha which is ridiculously simple to get around of. Just update your forum code and it'll be fine.

In my company we're using this in a new free Android service we openned recently, and it works though, and I saw this applied in many places and it seems to be working really good, so why do you say that?

Also, something must have been changed on the forum services, because this started to happen exactly this month, a new year, when normally "stuff expires", so it just not a coincidence... might be the forum code, might be a expired spam-protection service.

[iloveut99]

Try use some question for human only like 'what's the color of a strawberry?', alternatively you can change the registration forms to a non standard phpbb format so bots block in the wall.

This is better than captcha which is frequently hard enough to even humans recognize what it is written with that weird chars.

[anth]

you get new floods of spambots whenever the phpBB captcha system has been cracked. The only thing that I've found to work reasonably well is banning all of china and russia from my forum.

[--=PsyXandeR=--]

you get new floods of spambots whenever the phpBB captcha system has been cracked. The only thing that I've found to work reasonably well is banning all of china and russia from my forum.

Does it mean that I'm supposed to be banned as well? I'm Russian hur hur. Seriously, that's some really bad logic. I mean at this rate we could also bad Americans, eh? And by Americans I actually mean guys from USA and not Canadians since those guys are cool. Now, what I am saying is that banning IPs from specific countries can somewhat be seen as politics. Imagine that some decent Russian guy wants to register here. He does so, and the next moment he gets that really beautiful "Banned from forums message" message as well as message from Mod saying "ou got Russian Ip... BAN!". What will his thoughts be then? " Oh fucking Americans ". The point is, lets keep it fair for everyone.

[anth]

I do have some ban exceptions to allow the very few russian visitors we get to actually see the forums. The fact is though that ALL the spambots I've seen on my forums (and I've had a LOT of them) were either russian or chinese.

[JackGriffin]

I do have some ban exceptions to allow the very few russian visitors we get to actually see the forums. The fact is though that ALL the spambots I've seen on my forums (and I've had a LOT of them) were either russian or chinese.

I can also second that, and Ferali can vouch for it as he can access the backend of the forum there. Every single spam account has a Russian origin. In fact I just finished with my provider blocking as many Russian ranges at the host level as we could find because I was getting DDoS attacks, again from only Russian IP's.

It has nothing to do with international politics and everything to do with blocking where the trouble is coming from.

[UT99.org]

Put simply a question of mandatory field for registration