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May 8, 2008

vBulletin needs to tackle Private Message Spam

Posted by Sarah King in Technical Discussions

Thanks to the Black Hat community not keeping a lid on their activities I’ve been made aware of a spamming system targetted at the DigitalPoint forums. It can, however, be used on any vBulletin forum - I would assume. Some have implemented different rules around when you can send a private message, and some might even have captcha - but it’s all circumventable. More »

December 17, 2007

Domain registration changes we need!

Posted by Sarah King in Technical Discussions

I check the whois records for domains reasonably often. Whoisguard type systems are commonly in place to protect the identity of the domain owner. No problems there.

What irks, though, is the people who give completely false information… like this one where the info is incomplete and gives an Australian address yet I know that the actual owner is in India. By saying he’s in Melbourne he aquires a western credibility he perceives as superior to his Indian identity. More »

July 4, 2006

vBulletin and Spammers

Posted by Sarah King in Technical Discussions

I’m a moderator on a few forums, one phpBB and the rest are vBulletin. One was a surprise - I hadn’t realised until I started getting reported posts

Personally I find the vBulletin forums better to moderate than phpBB but it’s a relatively close call - until you start banning people and looking for cheats. Then vBulletin comes into it’s own. More »

June 29, 2006

A novel way to block spammers

Posted by Sarah King in Directory Management, PHP & Web Development

I was doing a reorganisation of RealState’s Ontario category and wanted to manually check one of the sites and found I was “forbidden”

Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

While the rest of us are using Akismet, content filters and the like this site’s webmaster had taken a bolder approach to knocking dead the spammers… More »

May 17, 2006

NoFollow Nonsense

Posted by Sarah King in Search Engine Optimisation

NoFollow was hailed as the saviour of our sites, the answer to comment spam, forum spam and poorly maintained sites.

The idea was that by adding the "rel" attribute to a link the search engines would know that the link isn't endorsed by the site.

The syntax isn't difficult and easy enough for a spammer to find, and walk away from.

Sadly, the spammers haven't caught on, and continue to employ unfortunates to do their dirty work, hoping that one day someone will see the light and spend some money on their ridiculous sites.

A spam filled site is a neglected site, one where the owner has had good intentions but not the time or inclination to follow through. The spam becomes a red flag to Joe Average that the site isn't maintained and to look further for the information sought. That the site will eventually be downgraded in the search engines is appropriate - it is after all, stale and abandoned.

More »

March 12, 2006

BBC frame any site - not just the good ones!

Posted by Sarah King in Technical Discussions

Checking the moderated comments on this blog I came across a link that used the BBC's website to link to unsavory sites. In the example below I'm using one of my sites

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/mainframe.shtml?http://www.realstate.ws

and it astounds me that the BBC leave this door wide open. Surely they could have some sort of filter to ensure that the site being linked to is "approved". I appreciate that it would take alot of effort to construct and maintain such a list but I believe a great many people will be fooled by the apparant endorsement by the BBC.

March 8, 2006

Crude and Ineffective!

Posted by Sarah King in WordPress

Spam is one of those topics that gets returned to time and again. Well, I was just updating this blog and found:

More »