Info on BA spam attacks here

Is the site hacked? Any info for us?

Looks like a random email generator is creating email accounts, setting up BA accounts, and spamming until each bot is banned.

We need something that does not allow new users to post more than 1 new thread a day.
If they post garbage/spam on post one nuke em.

The site hasn’t been hacked as far as we can tell. There are, however, spambots that are somehow circumventing our spam blocks and finding a way to get new posts up without first going through the moderation queue. This is the third day in a row.

We’ve been tweaking the moderation rules to try to head things off, but apparently that hasn’t quite worked completely. There’s always the chance that these bots are exploiting a hole in Vbulletin, but I’m not sure that we’re ready to call it that just yet.

Kim Jong Un is using the internet again. Damn you North Korea! You are not best Korea!

Four days now. Same time, same forum. Could be worse. Cue the Vikings…

I doctored up the thread title.

I was wondering if there would be any way to block those threads considering whether the title has oriental characters or not (more than 4 of those contiguous characters for example). It’s a forum in English after all.

I learned all the words to my favorite Kpop songs by reading BA the past few days.

Five days in a row so far.

The bots seem to drop their load here right around 2-3 AM (US Eastern) each day. Still trying figure out how they’re getting through.

When the spam problem be solved, Could ‘Today’s Posts’ link come back to unlogged users?. It’s really useful :slight_smile:

Huh… Was that a feature that the forum had at one point? I’d never actually used it.

it is still in Quck Links > ‘Today’s Posts’ when you are logged in, but it is much more comfortable if it can be used without being logged in. Until a few days ago you could access to it without being logged in.
For me it is the easiest way to follow the recent activity in the whole forum.

Immediately after log out, the link is still there as it was until a few days ago (but now requires log in):

Interesting. I wonder what changed made that happen?

Also, I guess this kind of shows how frequently I look at the site while logged out. I’m always logged in!

Maybe this is the NSA tool powered ransom ware?

Trying to tunnel into BA users?

Another recent change is we can’t access user posts ( L Click user name > View Forum Posts / https://blenderartists.org/forum/search.php?do=finduser&userid=insertIDhere&contenttype=vBForum_Post&showposts=1 ) unless logged in.

Seems like BA is starting to fall apart from lack of care to me.

Bugs cropping up (like the one with quick reply and quotes) and now the spam impacting upwards of several forums at once. We don’t here much these days from the Blendercookie staff other than Fweeb and there’s no sign of the move towards the more modern and (quite possibly more secure) Discourse software.

Something has to be done or the site risks falling to the fate it nearly succumbed to when Goofster gave Blendercookie the keys.

It is happening again in the off topic forum.And two in game engine support and discussion.Finished project forum has it to.Works in project forum has it to.

An improved user / thread flagging system could help.

https://blenderartists.org/forum/report.php?p=3190569 (flags my previous post)

https://blenderartists.org/forum/report.php?u=283218 (modified and testing on a spammer user id)

Edit: Tested in address bar, denied access.

Delete delete.

Maybe time to implement some kind of minimum comments system? Have to post 5 comments or something before you can post a thread?