3DO ZONE Forums

We have been severely spammed over the past couple of hours. Hopefully, it's all cleared up now. If you're looking at your account and thinking hmmm, i've been deactivated/disabled/deleted It's probably my fault. Don't have a hissy fit (or you wont re-enabled) send me a PM and i'll sort you out

3DOKid.

next to be removed are

byiernicx
Cliquick
DotNotcisputs

plus the page and a half of new spammers

Yep.

All new members are being validated by me. And as usual, that service will be crap.

We've had 10 new registrations today in the last 4 hours all from such auspicious usernames as "sac Louis vuitton"

If Louis Vuitton wishes to join he can, and in his case, i'll make an exception. If he wants ROMs or Warez or talk about Justin Beiber, and the demise of Twilight he most certainly can. Given that he's been dead since 1892. And that goes for anyone. Stump up a valid death certificate for yourself and we'll sort out a few images for you.

3DOKid.

3DOKid wrote: If you're looking at your account and thinking hmmm, i've been deactivated/disabled/deleted It's probably my fault. Don't have a hissy fit (or you wont re-enabled) send me a PM and i'll sort you out

3DOKid.

So it's your fault I'm a "Banned 3DO Demi-God"

Glad to see you were on the scene, my email was being flooded so I popped on real quick and turned off registering. Sorry about being away for a bit, haven't been feeling well. Odd change to the look of the forums, gonna take some getting use to. I'll try and go through the rest later (over 20) and remove them.

UPDATE: Wow that was a lot of them. Deleted all the new ones. Turns out when we switched all the spam bot precautions were turned off.

Figured something was up ! Not minding the new look but desperately missing the "posts since last visit" option.
Mattyg is in da house!

mattyg wrote:Figured something was up ! Not minding the new look but desperately missing the "posts since last visit" option.
Mattyg is in da house!

Just use the 'view new posts' option at the top of the home page. Pretty simple

Might want to check on "andybthedj", that user seemed to make a legitimate post in the "What's your 3DO story?" thread. I only mention this because I noticed it says "SPAMMER" under his name, which I'm assuming means he was blocked/deactivated.

http://3do.cdinteractive.co.uk/viewtopi ... =24#p34035

No, that just means he's only made a few posts. I think Kid set it to 1 post on the old set up and now it's 3. Just a cute tag he made, andybthedj is ok.

Haha! Typical 'Kid humor. I like it.

NeoGeoNinja wrote:

mattyg wrote:Figured something was up ! Not minding the new look but desperately missing the "posts since last visit" option.
Mattyg is in da house!

Just use the 'view new posts' option at the top of the home page. Pretty simple

Cheers, system wasn't automatically logging me on so I couldn't see the option - all good now

Anyone notice that if a new post is in a long thread it won't take you straight to it ... like in the Introduce yourself thread, I click on unread posts and it takes me to page 1 ... I've noticed this in every bumped thread that spans multiple pages.

Click either next to the topic for the first unread post or next to the user's name to jump to the last post .

I'll have to throw some anti-spam code up.

In the mean time I've enabled account activation by administrators alone. That will stop the flood for now!

Well I did make it so they would have to at least read the rules first, but that slimy kitchen sales man finally looked up the answer.

3DO Experience wrote:Well I did make it so they would have to at least read the rules first, but that slimy kitchen sales man finally looked up the answer.

Why do they even make the effort? I can't imagine that type of spam marketing is very effective ... they might be able to trick gramma, but why would she be on the 3DO Forums in the first place?

Trev wrote:Why do they even make the effort? I can't imagine that type of spam marketing is very effective ... they might be able to trick gramma, but why would she be on the 3DO Forums in the first place?

As I understand it, it's all about Google page ranking, and almost all message board spam is carried out by bots. They're trying to plant links that point to sketchy sites so that, when you search on certain terms, those sites come up first in Google results, thus increasing the number of people who get scammed/phished/infected. The spambots are programmed to look for message boards with open registration or, failing that, vulnerabilities in their registration method.

I'd imagine that at least some bots target message boards using particular software, and couldn't care less whether it's a 3DO site, a site for zither-playing aardvarks, or whatever. Of course it's a bonus if someone here is dumb enough to click on the links and gets malware or buys fake pharmaceuticals but their real target is the whole Internet-using world.

goldenband wrote: I'd imagine that at least some bots target message boards using particular software, and couldn't care less whether it's a 3DO site, a site for zither-playing aardvarks, or whatever.