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MaxE
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02 Nov 2024, 5:11 am

Where are the admins?


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MrsPeel
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02 Nov 2024, 5:30 am

someone please block this Singh person!! !



Cornflake
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02 Nov 2024, 5:46 am

MaxE wrote:
Where are the admins?
Here.

This is an unpaid voluntary job and I'm busy on WP 15-plus hours a day.
Inevitably spammers will slip through occasionally, although I catch most before they post: an unseen service, provided willingly.


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Sweetleaf
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02 Nov 2024, 6:13 am

Cornflake wrote:
MaxE wrote:
Where are the admins?
Here.

This is an unpaid voluntary job and I'm busy on WP 15-plus hours a day.
Inevitably spammers will slip through occasionally, although I catch most before they post: an unseen service, provided willingly.


You're doing good I think,well especially if you are doing the thankless job of being moderator for free and not even getting paid. but yeah this particular poster is spamming adds on the forum so worth looking into, and Idk I know it is not best to engage with spammers too much but I did try to convince them in a PM that whatever they are selling people here arent going to buy so they should go to ebay or amazon if they want to sell something but if they have autism they are more than welcome to post about that.


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Cornflake
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02 Nov 2024, 6:27 am

Thanks! :heart:

It's best to not respond at all to spammers - especially when they blast one forum with 51 posts. 8O
That one was clearly a bot, an automated process, and as these things tend to occur in bursts we'll probably get a few more pushing the same rubbish.

Well-meaning new members being unaware of the site rules do occasionally advertise in their first post, but they tend to be accidental and can be amicably addressed.


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Sweetleaf
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02 Nov 2024, 6:51 am

Cornflake wrote:
Thanks! :heart:

It's best to not respond at all to spammers - especially when they blast one forum with 51 posts. 8O
That one was clearly a bot, an automated process, and as these things tend to occur in bursts we'll probably get a few more pushing the same rubbish.

Well-meaning new members being unaware of the site rules do occasionally advertise in their first post, but they tend to be accidental and can be amicably addressed.



yeah idk I was juust mad but I know sending a PM to one of those is basically throwing words at a wall, cause the person who put it there probably isn't even looking at stuff like that and certainly wont respond. But still I am just perplexed why they think this particular site is a good dumping ground for that crap that no one here would even be remotely interested in...Like what they think they're going to get a good 'sale' off autistic people who hate that kind of marketing.


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Gentleman Argentum
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02 Nov 2024, 6:52 am

Cornflake wrote:
MaxE wrote:
Where are the admins?
Here.

This is an unpaid voluntary job and I'm busy on WP 15-plus hours a day.
Inevitably spammers will slip through occasionally, although I catch most before they post: an unseen service, provided willingly.


Sympathy :heart:

I like your avatar, it is funny and captures the archetypal mod.

I modded a lot of things in a lot of different sites in my time.

I think that these things sometimes employ humans (maybe even slaves) to pass the captcha check and then bots to run the ads. But obviously if they spam a bunch of messages at once they are going to be banned. It makes no sense to me but perhaps they believe that massive exposure in a short amount of time might ensnare a few vulnerable online denizens to click where they should not, and get trapped in malware or a financial scam. That is what those bots are pushing if you ask me. They try to trap people that do not know any better like my mother when she suffered from Alzheimer's disease.

Back when I had a blog...somewhere? I forget... I analyzed the system log and sleuthed where the bots were coming from and had a massive kill list for IP addresses. It is long since out of date by now. That sort of thing is always changing unfortunately.

I imagine that there is a ready made script just to attack this particular forum software.


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Cornflake
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02 Nov 2024, 9:00 am

Sweetleaf wrote:
But still I am just perplexed why they think this particular site is a good dumping ground for that crap that no one here would even be remotely interested in...Like what they think they're going to get a good 'sale' off autistic people who hate that kind of marketing.
Puzzles me too. I can only assume someone has paid a botnet service for a spamming campaign and this site happens to be on a list of some sort.
But they're clearly doing a lousy job of it.

Gentleman Argentum wrote:
I like your avatar, it is funny and captures the archetypal mod.
:lol: Just what I was aiming for...

Quote:
I think that these things sometimes employ humans (maybe even slaves) to pass the captcha check and then bots to run the ads. But obviously if they spam a bunch of messages at once they are going to be banned.
That's probably how most of them operate - it costs nothing to flood-post some nonsense and if just one person is snared, before the inevitable ban and tidy-up, that presumably makes it worthwhile.

Quote:
It makes no sense to me but perhaps they believe that massive exposure in a short amount of time might ensnare a few vulnerable online denizens to click where they should not, and get trapped in malware or a financial scam. That is what those bots are pushing if you ask me. They try to trap people that do not know any better like my mother when she suffered from Alzheimer's disease.
I'm sorry to hear your mother got caught, especially given her condition. That's just cruel.

But going by the news reports of people handing over $tens of thousands, sometimes more, unfortunately it can be profitable to suck people into their deceit.
So again - never respond to this stuff here or elsewhere: there's a reason why it seems too good to be true, and how someone you don't know is offering an amazing deal...

Quote:
I analyzed the system log and sleuthed where the bots were coming from and had a massive kill list for IP addresses. It is long since out of date by now. That sort of thing is always changing unfortunately.
It ends up as a game of whack-a-mole. I'd IP-blocked a large part of India (where most of it comes from) but they still find other ways.

Quote:
I imagine that there is a ready made script just to attack this particular forum software.
Yep. There are probably boilerplate scripts for many others too.


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SendInTheClowns
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04 Nov 2024, 7:14 pm

Cornflake, you are a wonderful asset to WP, an outstanding moderator and administrator, thank you for your enormous contribution here.



Cornflake
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04 Nov 2024, 7:17 pm

:oops: Awww, shucks...
Thanks though! :heart:


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