Is it just me or are spammers getting better and more skilled?

Just wanted to let everyone know that I spent a few hours today updating the spam capabilities of the DX Gaming Network.

As of right now the forums have had two new features to help combat the spammers. First off there is now required image verification before an account can be activated. Additionally we have signed up with a beta service called bbProtection that verifies every account activation and forum post against a database to ensure that repeat offender spammers never make it to our board. Lets hope this helps as I just deleted 800 spammer accounts from the forums.

The other update is to our download system where I outright removed the ability to comment to prevent spammers from even touching it.

Hopefully this will help everything run a bit smoother.

Another cool feature I added to the website is statistics from whos.amung.us. It shows real time statistics of how many people are on the website along with a list of our most popular pages. Who would have thought the server stats page would be #1? Not me

Great!

The website news page can't display most recent news thread anymore though.

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Excellent, ty bb

Those things were irritating

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Miner/Smith/Lumberjack/Carpenter/Cartographer
Alchemist/Fisherman/Tamer/Warrior/Daemon

Noone can PK you :p

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Philostetes
truth-<>-
MaxCarnage
Lysol-former
Maximus-former
Dracula-former
Kuka
Bl8dinc4K3

The only strange thing is why couldn't it've been done liek 1.5 years ago. :(

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wow awesome! i got tired of deleting there threads all the time

Something definately happened in the last few months where we seemed to have alot more spam posts then I have ever seen on here. It kept all of us busy that's for sure. Nice Job BB.

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Obsidian Moderator
Buying and Selling

Some are still slipping past the code but definetly not so many.

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Try not to let your mind wander...It is too small and fragile to be out by itself.

Fisker GM Fisherman
Noah [TLC] GM Lady Charmer
Pheonix PVM mage

How many staff does it take to screw in a light bulb?

One to script it.
One to debug it.
One to place it.
One to take the player pages bitching about it.
One to tell the others that they got it all wrong.

LOL I GOT PAST THE SPAM FILTER!!

i kid, i kid... ........................ slightly.

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R.I.P Will A.K.A Affliction/Bush-Fire/Decayed-Stone - "Stoners live and stoners die. f*** it all, let's go get high"
You should either love me with a passion, or hate me to death..

Thanks BB... this reduces alot of moderator workload

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Thassius
"Blessed are the noobs, for they shall inherit Obsidian" - Thassius

Thanks

Spam be back

lmao...

this be true, snook into the buying n sellin forum toooo

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Miner/Smith/Lumberjack/Carpenter/Cartographer
Alchemist/Fisherman/Tamer/Warrior/Daemon

The odd one will slip by obviously, but there has been alot less than before.

The latest version of PHPbb has the image verification built it. There's also a nice PHPbb addon which I had to install on my guild forums as well which prevents the activation process from completing unless they leave all their personal information blank. Most spam bots fill in website URLS, AIM information, msn information, where they live, etc. So when a spam bot triest to register even if they brute force try to guess the image key or have some kind of analysis tool for that it'll still fail. I've gone from like 20-30 spam accounts a day to none.

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Victor F. Laurence
aka GM CyberVic, Livistos, Soriathus, etc.
Read my blog "Enthusiam" at
http://www.victorlaurence.com