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Top tags today - SPAM (O.o)


Coby Foden
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ha yes, i see them too :smileywink:

But you know, a lot of tags are done without purpose... when you are too much in hurry to write your post, and dont wait enough till the page is fully load, it write your first words in the tab's field.. and then, often, ppl dont notice.. They fix their post and send. and the tag remains... 

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Post density and reregistering of bot accounts is occuring considerably faster than previously. They're also more sensitive to realising they're being blocked - they like it here.

If LL moderation has any intention of actually preventing this junk from affecting their reputation (i.e., before Google decides community.secondlife.com is an Indian escorts advertising site), they should've done it a while ago.

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well normally that cant be the spammer for mumbai or else, bec new resident and resident ranks in the forum cant give tags, you need to be at least "member", so you need a minimal ammount of post for that...

That said, since they post something like 20 at once, they become members fast lol.... 

So maybe you are right.. idk :smileywink:

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Trinity Yazimoto wrote:

well normally that cant be the spammer for mumbai or else, bec new resident and resident ranks in the forum cant give tags, you need to be at least "member", so you need a minimal ammount of post for that...

That said, since they post something like 20 at once, they become members fast lol.... 

So maybe you are right.. idk :smileywink:

Spammers don't tag their own posts as spam. ;)

There are also now between 6 and 8 autonomous systems posting the escort-based stuff. A handful of others post under other methods.

So far as I can tell) these tags aren't based on any reasonable length of time or quantity. The tags feature is under-used, it's collecting everything (the tag in the OP that comes 'first' was only ever distributed by one poster advertising their own combat system unsuccessfully).

Follow the link: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/tag/SPAM/tg-p/category-id/Forums

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From: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/bg-p/blog_feature_news/date/5-1-2011


The Refreshed and Fun Registration Experience
On the registration front, we’re knocking down the barriers that can sometimes prevent interested users from joining Second Life. If you haven’t checked out the Join experience lately, then you definitely should. New users start by picking an avatar in a dynamic, animated interface that immediately draws them in. We’ve also removed much of the non-essential information, that we used to require in the registration flow, to make it a quicker and more delightful on-boarding experience. We’re going to continue to refine and evolve this experience, but it is a big contributor to the 33% growth in new registrations.
[unquote]


This they thought to be a very good thing indeed. Quick, easy, even fun experience...   Ermm.gif


... could be so, for spammers.

extra_happy.gif 

 

:smileywink:

 

 

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Coby Foden wrote:

This they thought to be a very good thing indeed. Quick, easy, even fun experience...  
Ermm.gif
 

It is a good thing. There was no need to slow people down by asking a million-billion things during registration as they were doing before. It helps to have a very quick flow between sign-up and log-in - retention rates improved by a small handful of percent (LL, using their own definitions, now claim retention to be as high as 20% - it is not and has never been this high).

The downside to it of course is that LL think single-word names are adequate in a world where usernames are always quite visible - the 'reasonable' names get chewed through by old alts and spambots, leaving new users with a fistful of numbers.

There's also no reason for registration to SL to provide automatic access to the SL forums, only to SL. SL forum registration could easily require a secondary auth, with CAPTCHA or other bot countermeasures. Takes two seconds, but cuts the profit motives of the bot operators by orders of magnitude.

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Ceka Cianci wrote:

wouldn't all they need is one of those goofy letter things that change all the time ?

 

those things where you have to be a human to even understand  the letters and numbers to them?

 

I think the problem is that LL licensed Lithium's forum software. They have no idea how it works and no budget to pay Lithium for a solution. Other Lithium forums do not have this problem, so solutions are known and have been implemented. If LL thought a working forum would yield an attractive return on their investment, they'd invest in it.

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A CAPCHA in the SL account creation process would help. It wouldn't need to be in the forum software.

They could also implement one in the forum login process, although that would get in the way of computers logging automatically from stored usernames and passwords.

 

This is just general:-

What they can't do is ban the spammers' IPs and expect them to stop, because the spammers will undoubtedly be using what I think are called 'open relay' servers - other people's servers that have been set up sloppily enough that they can be used to relay page requests, and the pages come back via them. Email spammers use them.

I don't know a lot about it but, some years ago, I did know enough to write a programme that made use of them. I created a directory website and I wanted to populate it very quickly using data from the Yellow Pages website. So, to avoid a continual stream of page requests from my IP being spotted by the YP site, and my IP being banned, I used a load of open relay servers to do it, spooling round them so that each one wasn't requesting pages too quickly. Even then, the YP site's auto-detect system temporarily banned an occasional IP address, but it didn't stop my programme from continuing unabated.

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Phil Deakins wrote:

A CAPCHA in the SL account creation process would help. It wouldn't need to be in the forum software.

They could also implement one in the forum login process, although that would get in the way of computers logging automatically from stored usernames and passwords.

 

This is just general:-

What they can't do is ban the spammers' IPs and expect them to stop, because the spammers will undoubtedly be using what I think are called 'open relay' servers - other people's servers that have been set up sloppily enough that they can be used to relay page requests, and the pages come back via them. Email spammers use them.

I don't know a lot about it but, some years ago, I did know enough to write a programme that made use of them. I created a directory website and I wanted to populate it very quickly using data from the Yellow Pages website. So, to avoid a continual stream of page requests from my IP being spotted by the YP site, and my IP being banned, I used a load of open relay servers to do it, spooling round them so that each one wasn't requesting pages too quickly. Even then, the YP site's auto-detect system temporarily banned an occasional IP address, but it didn't stop my programme from continuing unabated.

Yep, there are endless ways to get around IP/MAC blocks, but that doesn't prevent even high school kids from setting up blogs and forums using open-source software that are fairly resistant to spam. There is no excuse for the spam here, other than a lack of interest on the part of LL.

I'm apalled that logging into LL's various properties still hasn't been coalesced into one page, where as you say, they could probably run their first line of defense against spam. I still have to log into the feed via a mechanism that's different than logging into the forum. LL is displaying a lack of web sophistication that's truly impressive.

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One thing I noticed is that most of the spammers' names look more or less like 'thought out' ones, if you know what I mean... but a few seem the result of a person hurriedly (and somewhat indifferently) hitting the keyboard in a semi-random manner, kinda like saying 'as long as it's alphanumeric characters, it'll go through the system'. Now, I don't know much about automated spamming bots, but these don't quite look like fully computer-generated text strings... could it be then that there's actual human beings doing the registration process, even if they then pass each succesful username/password combination to a fully automated spamming system? And if so, would captcha methods really slow they down that much?

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Ren Toxx wrote:

One thing I noticed is that most of the spammers' names look more or less like 'thought out' ones, if you know what I mean... but a few seem the result of a person hurriedly (and somewhat indifferently) hitting the keyboard in a semi-random manner, kinda like saying 
'as long as it's alphanumeric characters, it'll go through the system'
. Now, I don't know much about automated spamming bots, but these don't quite look like fully computer-generated text strings... could it be then that there's actual human beings doing the registration process, even if they then pass each succesful username/password combination to a fully automated spamming system? And if so, would captcha methods really slow they down that much?

It would depend on whether or not the spammer actually creates an account by hand. I think it's extremely unlikely.

If this were the only forum that the spammer is spamming, or one of just a few forums, then yes, spammers may create accounts by hand. But they target hundreds or thousands of forums so they can't create accounts by hand. What they'll do is create a list of usernames either by hand or programmatically for their spam programme to use.

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