JCSref comments spammed
 

When I was looking on the JCSref, in the comments I saw links for buying medications. This most likely was caused by spam bots. If it is possible to delete these comments please do so. Even better would be to try to block these.

~ Water[iT]

Woah! I haven't seen so much spam for ages. Definitely needs a filter or something to prevent users from doing this.

For the record, JCSref admins like myself can't do anything about this. It probably needs Quist or someone like that... I sent him a PM about this issue a while ago, but he didn't respond.
EDIT: or, I thought I did... but J2O disagrees. Oh well.

Wow, look at this: http://www.jazz2online.com/jcsref/no...id&menu=topics
Maybe you could ask the university to take those pages down. Probably made by a student there..

I did get UR's message and I even thought I responded, but maybe I did not but merely wrote the message and forgot about it, like I'm wont to do. Cleaning up and building in protection is on my list of things to do.

Also you could try to block the IP Adress of the spam bot from posting comments.

"wont to do" seems like the worst dutch literal translation ever for expressing a habit

Well, I'm Dutch, and even I have no idea what Frank meant with that sentence.

I can trace the IPs for you if you PM me with them. From there I can report this "spambot" to it's ISP for this or leave it up to you to do.

Thanks for the offer. I can track them myself too, though - and it's unlikely to matter much. If anything's going to stop spam it's an organised approach, not reporting an IP to an ISP and have the spammer use one of the unlimited IPs to its proposal.

Stijn&Gry: "Wont to do", Dictionary.com: wont >:-(
I'm not sure if I used it right though. It's context of "habit" is stronger than I thought. I just often do it.

Is there any 'universal' sort of way to block spambots? I seem to be getting a lot of them at my forum.

Sort of. You could best search for some articles on the subject. There are bound to be many. I will quickly sketch a few explanations of things you can do:

1. Disable anonymous posting. Spambots love anonymity. While some forums might want to allow anonymity, in these days it is only possible if you have exquisite spam protection (see other points). Unless you have such protection, be wary of allowing anonymous users to post.

2. Enable CAPTCHA / install a CAPTCHA plugin. These "note down the symbols in the image" plugins count on bots not being able to read images. In a lot of instances, they cannot. In some, they can. Spambots are being trained to crack more and more CAPTCHA types. Still, some will help a lot. Most forum software will either have options or plugins available to enable captcha plugins, either before posting or during registration. The JCF has CAPTCHA enabled

3. Raise hurdles. Spambots look for forms that they can put their spam in, and submit. Most of them are automatic, even if some are not. Spambots are sometimes trained by humans to work with certain sites. Spambots have no problem registering to J2O, for example, even though the site is homemade. Still, if you add hurdles, like, say, an extra checkbox you need to check before you can post (our wiki and submit news forms both use techniques such as these to prevent spam and it works great), many spambots will be foiled. I'm not sure if I should go into the system the JCF uses, but we have a 'hurdle' against spambots, an idea by Link, and since we've implemented it we've had (virtually?) no spam. The downside of hurdles is that spam bots may learn to overcome them.

4. Use distributed spam protection. Some software, I don't remember the name, but google will help you, enables you to connect / talk to a central server that contains IPs of known spammers, or lists of common spam words / phrases. Akismet is an example. Many blog software (and perhaps forums) have plugins to work with Akismet.

I will probably use approach 3 for jcs.REF. It worked well enough for J2O so far. In the end, Spam is pretty much way too strong, defeating most existing systems slowly. I've (manually, mostly one by one) deleted at least 10,000 spam messages on my blogs so far, for example, that passed the protection I had installed but which the spam software learned to foil.

Macintosh Garden has a serious problem with this.

The "wont" thing was perfectly valid English, but rather archaic.

Wheeee, I can still log in to jcsref. There doesn't seem to be a way to delete comments, though...