BOTS AND SPAM OH MY

[Terry]

On behalf of Admin and TerryLoveForum I want to apologize for the spam reaching your messages, and the up tick recently. Per usual our Team aka @Taylor Love and @Andrea Love Forum MGR is working with us on this.

Thank you everyone for reporting, and be patient and understanding.

Team Terry

 

[Taylorjm]

I know what you mean. I'm getting tired of hot women sending me pictures (when my wife is looking over my shoulder) and me trying to convince her "no dear, it's a plumbing site, really it is". lol

 

[Sponsor]

 

[Terry]

I know what you mean. I'm getting tired of hot women sending me pictures (when my wife is looking over my shoulder) and me trying to convince her "no dear, it's a plumbing site, really it is". lol

I feel you-
This recent one was sneaky. My own kids were eating breakfast next to me when the notifications popped on my screen. HA. "mom what is on grandpas forum".....lol
apologies again,
Team Terry- @Andrea Love Forum MGR

 

[Breplum]

Congratulations and kudos on beating them back (this round).

 

[Taylor Love]

Yeah, we need some better anti spam tools for sure. We'll get it though.

Spoiler: The technical details

So the current status is that Google RecaptchaV2 is not very good at stopping bot accounts. Also, as soon as they managed to find an IP address that wasn't banned they made around 1000 new accounts and sent out something like 13000 spam messages via the site's private message feature. We took away the power for new accounts to send out private messages for now, and are in the process of figuring out how to erase all of these spam messages in a batch.

Overall, I just think we need better tooling for getting rid of spam once it has happened. Also email validation is going to be turned on soon. I've already confirmed that the feature works, and we did manage to send some emails out to gmail accounts before the spammers suddenly used the forum to launch a massive PM spam campaign. Email notifications for PMs will no longer send out a summary of the spam messages. Trying to disincentivize that a bit.