SPAM in the forum

[WILL]

Thanks Paul!

It would be great if you cleaned ZenGL topics, because I see a lot of spam which is deleted, but still present with mark "Deleted by Andru" But that is great, that spambots won't bother us any more.

I am presently going through the entire forums clearing out all old spam. (Starting on the top down to the bottom forum.) There is lots. It's sort of sprayed all over the site really. Once it's cleaned up however it'll be gone forever.

[WILL]

Finally! Not a single moderated thread in the entire forums.

Took me a few hours, but I cleaned out the site of all old buried spam and unapproved legit posts. A big oops and sorry to all those we missed. We are trying to do better!!!

As of now the only place that may gather future (hidden!) spam is the New Members forum where new PGD members have to post to let us know that they are human.

[paul_nicholls]

Nice work!

[Andru]

Great! The only one thing which is left - avoid all these strange names below the forum in section "Currently Active Users". Why not to use "anti-spambot question(s)" on registration page? Or they are already used in pair with new "Welcome to PGD!" email?

[SilverWarior]

If you haven't noticed already the number off theese strange names reduced quite a lot. Now you can actually see who is presen on the forum without browsing trough several pages on active users list.

[Andru]

I noticed this

[WILL]

Spambots give up as they cannot do anything since most of their usual tricks don't seem to be letting them post. Poor spambots.

Great! The only one thing which is left - avoid all these strange names below the forum in section "Currently Active Users". Why not to use "anti-spambot question(s)" on registration page? Or they are already used in pair with new "Welcome to PGD!" email?

Not something that we can really consider without majorly modifying the site software. Which is also something we won't do as a measure of experience telling us not to. We have however been thinking of ways to eliminate specific telltale things that spambots seem to tell us when they make up these stupid accounts, but most of that is up to the vBulletin folks to implement into vBulletin.

I'm planning on addressing this with the vBulletin development team to tr to get the ball rolling on some better basic anti-spam or spam reducing features in the future.

The next update (which is already released) will help add better moderation to blogs. Currently they can make blog posts without being restricted by their membership status. (Moderated Member vs Regular Member) This has been changed and we can now restrict New (Moderated) Members from creating new blogs posts.

We currently get a minimal amount of spam blog posts, but you still won't see them as regular members.

[SilverWarior]

Today when visiting PGD I saw tha our site still isn't completly safe from spamming. On home page there was some text promoting selling of pils online etc. By the looks of it it seems that the text gets directly inserted into html code of the page. The text is being shown on the place where "recent tutorials" are usualy shown. Theese are then moved after the inserted text. Websites caption has also been changed. Becouse of this PGD site will be automaticly scored lower by web search engines (webpage caption isn't related to website domain) and this will result in our webpage being shown further down in web search engines results.
I also noticed Google saying that our website may contain some harmful content, probably becouse of pre mentioned problem.

EDIT: The error is ony seen if you come to the site and are not loged in (permament cookie). It is also only visible when you acces the site from main domain (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com).

[WILL]

I've had a look at this, but somehow I cannot see it logged in or not from the main page.

Could you provide a screenshot? IS it still there?

I can think of only one way that spammers can throw spam in and that's through the blogs, but I thought we fixed that as all newly registered members cannot blog right away until un-moderated. I'll have to have another look, but I'm not seeing this spam text you are talking about.

There is another update, I'll need to patch the site anyways hopefully it fixes your issue.

If not, I'd also do a double check of your own system just in case.

[SilverWarior]

It seems that the problem is gone at the moment.
But you can use google to look for the website preview containing the malicious content. Acording to google the website preview is from 13 of March 2012. But the site looks the same that I saw it today.