PaulStoffregen
Well-known member
Robin & I are working on the spam problem. Turns out most of the recent spam is coming from just a few ISPs in Bangalore, India and also some in Pakistan. Seems the spammers are using low-wage labor in these areas to defeat anti-spam measures.
I'd like to ask all the "plus" users who are helping with deleting spam to please keep the IP number when deleting a message. In the moderation area (unseen to everyone else... it's where the spams go when you report them) is a sticky thread with the IP number block list. Please edit that message to add any new IP numbers in the section at the top.
We've been looking up the netblocks and adding them to our banned IP numbers list. Bangalore is particularly complicated, because many of the IP allocations are only small blocks of 1024 numbers, and other "nearby" small allocations are scattered across other Asian-Pacific area countries.
Robin is also working on banning freshly registered spammer accounts before they post. Earlier this week she deleted a couple thousand of them!
Eventually we may need to consider more draconian measures, like manual human approval of new registrations. But that day has not arrived. Blocking small IP ranges seems to be enough for now, but it does depend on collecting the IP numbers before deleting the messages. If you're in the "plus" group, please make sure you get those IPs onto the list in the moderation area, so I can look up and ban their netblocks.
I'd like to ask all the "plus" users who are helping with deleting spam to please keep the IP number when deleting a message. In the moderation area (unseen to everyone else... it's where the spams go when you report them) is a sticky thread with the IP number block list. Please edit that message to add any new IP numbers in the section at the top.
We've been looking up the netblocks and adding them to our banned IP numbers list. Bangalore is particularly complicated, because many of the IP allocations are only small blocks of 1024 numbers, and other "nearby" small allocations are scattered across other Asian-Pacific area countries.
Robin is also working on banning freshly registered spammer accounts before they post. Earlier this week she deleted a couple thousand of them!
Eventually we may need to consider more draconian measures, like manual human approval of new registrations. But that day has not arrived. Blocking small IP ranges seems to be enough for now, but it does depend on collecting the IP numbers before deleting the messages. If you're in the "plus" group, please make sure you get those IPs onto the list in the moderation area, so I can look up and ban their netblocks.