On Monday, 7/16/07 when I glanced at the number of subscribers to the <a href="http://groups.drupal.org/contributed-module-status>Contributed Module Status group, it stood somewhere around 950.
To my surprise, Wednesday morning it had ballooned to 1259. Suspecting something was wrong, I checked the list of subscribers and spotted the problem right away. Spammers. Damn them!
My conclusion from clicking on any of the obvious spammers is that some automated sign up mechanism was used to sign up the roughly 300 spammers on Tuesday, 7/17/07 because when I click on any of the spammers' profiles, they all generally state the same membership period of somewhere just under 24 hours as of when I posted this.
The spammers are spread out everywhere on this group's subscriber list, from 0-9 and a-z:
08Ch5cZi - Member for 23 hours 29 min
i9g7rQow - Member for 23 hours 28 min
ZXK8NkLa - Member for 23 hours 29 min
Is there any solution to avoid this type of abuse? Is there any way to delete these spammers under than someone going through a group and deleting them one by one? It appears they haven't yet started posting because their profiles do not include any posts...yet....or it could be that any spam posts were already deleted.
Thanks,
Walt
Comments
deleted
I have gone through and deleted all the users at /admin/user/user (which allowed me to delete them page by page in chunks of a dozen). It still took me considerable amount of time. First I tried to block them as usual, but the form validation said I have illegal combination of choices (which is quite interesting), but anyway I just went ahead and deleted them. Hopefully I did not catch any false positives.
I strongly believe that spam protection measures should be added to (groups.)drupal.org, and I voiced my concerns several times before.
what modules
and i ask again - what spam protection modules are effective and well maintained? i need some input here.
spam.module
<href="http://drupal.org/project/spam">spam.module works extremely well for me on a couple of sites. While everyone suggests that akismet is the weapon of choice, no-one has offered me reason not to use spam.module. So that's my 2c.
thanks
thanks much for cleaning up.
BTW, people are writing scripts against this site explicitly. i ask a custom registration question is is sure to stop any generic script.
Wow - thank you!
Gabor,
You have gone above and beyond the call of duty. Thanks for your excellent help on this!
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing