Is it possible to use some kind of spam filter on the forum? So that for example topics with blackberry and such are not posted?

Is all the spam coming from robots or from actual users? Can we do something to prevent this too? It tends to be a user per spam post.

It looks like there is no generated code people have to type when registering here. Can this be sorted? I'm pretty sure the spam is generated by some sort of robot, and not human users, so this should hopefully reduce the spam a bit.

If it's possible to see what IPs the users have, and ban them, that would be great too. Perhaps software is used to generate a fake IP, but at least check it out. I don't have rights to do that.

It's getting pretty tiring to have to delete a handful of topics in various subforums every single day. No wonder it piles up if nobody are looking after the forum in a few days, let alone weeks.

I attempted to flag those posts using the "!" icon (next to "quote"), but that didn't seem to work. This would at least the posts to the attention of the site owner. A working spam filter would be best.

There are probably better options, but one "trick" I use on my personal website (non forum) is to create a hidden link to a page that no person would see but a robot crawling the site would encounter. I also add that link (sub-folder) into my robots.txt file. Then I create a rewrite rule so any IP that requests that URL gets blacklisted for a period of time. (This uses linux+apache+iptables.)

Some added detail:

The heavy lifting (blacklisting) comes from an open source script (DAVBlack).

the link:

Code: Select all

<A href<deletethis>="/dontgothere/"><img src="/art/transpixel.gif" height="1" width="1" border="0"></A>

("<deletethis>" is there to make the href appear here)

robots.txt:

Code: Select all

User-agent: *
Disallow: /dontgothere/

I include "dontgothere" in the $REASONS string of DAVblack, and that's 95% of the challenge. (Pretty simple, really.)

The Rewrite rule is mainly for redirecting any references to the same folder to a 500 page. (Permission Denied)

Thanks a lot Tom. Hopefully that would reduce it a bit.

I didn't see this prior, but I just PMed Martin with some comments. I see he hasn't been on the site for a while, but hopefully he gets a message about the PM in his mail. That happens when I get PMs anyway.

It's such a shame, cause I think this site can be so much more than it currently is. Right now it's basically just a tracker. The forums and comments could all be removed, and hardly anybody would notice. I fondly remember the old site's forum, and how active it was at times. Always new posts every day, sometimes with very interesting discussions going on. I'm sure we know an awful lot of stuff between us, but right now we're just isolated islands.

I think I have mentioned this before, but this is exactly what Chomsky means when he says the internet is great for acquiring information, but that it also leads to atomization. It's very easy to get the feeling you're the only one in the world with your world views. This site and its forum could be one way to counteract that feeling.

Pangaea wrote:It's such a shame, cause I think this site can be so much more than it currently is. Right now it's basically just a tracker. The forums and comments could all be removed, and hardly anybody would notice. I fondly remember the old site's forum, and how active it was at times. Always new posts every day, sometimes with very interesting discussions going on. I'm sure we know an awful lot of stuff between us, but right now we're just isolated islands.

Can I ask what changed so that these forums became as dead as they are now? What was different about this site and the forums when the forums were more active? It is a shame that there isn't much more activity in the forums here. As you say, when you consider the common political interests and views held by most people frequenting this site, there is a potential for this site to be so much more than what it is currently, which is basically just a tracker...although one that seems to be quite popular based on the number of Google hits this site seems to get, and based on the number of torrent downloads.

I actually can't remember exactly how the design was before, cause it's been a few years now. It was called chomskytorrents before. The forum was much more active though, both from 'our' side and some trolls. It was always nice to log on and see a fair bit of activity in many threads. I remember learning quite a bit back then.

Now the site is basically just a tracker. Would be great if we could get much more activity in the forum again. Feels like such a loss that many people with similar views visit the site, but only click a few links and leave. I'm sure we'd all learn much more by discussing things and sharing information.

Hey guys,

sorry for joining this discussion so late, as I told Pangaea in a PM, I'm distracted by things outside the interwebs at the moment.

I'm aware of the bad spam situation. I try to keep a close eye on the torrent index (along with the other mods), but I paid less attention to the forums because there's been so little actual activity here for so long (and that preceded the spam situation by a long time).

Manual IP bans aren't the way to go, the spammers never use an account for more than a handful of posts before they move on to the next account. We could catch and ban the bots the way major.tom described, but I doubt all of them will fall for it, and apart from that, hidden links are a big no-go in terms of search engine optimization.

I guess we'll try putting up a captcha image first and see how that goes. I'll try to get on it ASAP. In the meantime I'll monitor the forums and help manually removing all the crap.

Martin wrote:Manual IP bans aren't the way to go, the spammers never use an account for more than a handful of posts before they move on to the next account. We could catch and ban the bots the way major.tom described, but I doubt all of them will fall for it, and apart from that, hidden links are a big no-go in terms of search engine optimization.

Ah, but the "good" search engines will not ignore robots.txt (so they won't try to crawl that page). Whereas the "bad" robots will ignore robots.txt, perhaps even intentionally using the references there for places to look.

Regardless, nice to see you back posting. Also nice to see OneBigTorrent is still around.