What's with the spammers lately?? Suggestions, please!

I don't know the admin options available under this forum system but on some you could:

1. Moderate a new members posts (for the 1st or 1st few posts). It's a bit negative but I think most serious new members would recognise the need and should not discourage a genuine new contributor. I'd suggest avoiding blocking new users from starting new threads (beyond moderating them) as many new users might get here with a specific question about something they've seen and hence need a new thread for their question.

2. I've noticed but not read the posts but if they contain a URL link then, (if the forum supports it), block new users from posting with a link until "approved" or until e.g. 10 other posts. Might be limiting for a new person e.g. "Saw this <link to photo> What is it?".

2. To address the specific nuisance from Vietnam, is it possible to put a filter of some of the extended Vietnamese characters e.g. the Đ ầ ợ, etc (just pick a selection of the Vietnamese accented characters from the previous SPA posts). Many are pretty specific to Vietnamese. Should not impact too many member posts as it's ... About the British Isles.

3. If you are/can ban IP addresses, instead ban entire networks. dnslytics.com/ip/ if you put in the IP address (top right) it gives loads of details of the source including the CIDR which many blocking systems will accept as a complete range. On my own web site I find many of the nuisances are from hosting companies (who have no legitimate interest in my site) so are banned. Some nuisances are from public networks where one has to make a judgement about restricting genuine users vs stopping nuisances. I regard blocking individual IP addresses as a bit of a waste of time as DHCP means same nuisance person will be on a different IP address tomorrow - hence entire network or don't bother (and even that will take time to build-up a good blocking config).

4. If you can block search engines from scanning the site, block <coccoc.com>. There is nothing wrong with the search engine (it's a Vietnamese search engine), just that it seems to create an interest in Vietnam - but it's probably too late now as the nuisances already have the site address.

Regarding SPAMers "Common Sense" - it may seem weird but often they may not be targeting the forum readership but rather search engines. Search engines tend to rate pages higher when other sites include links to the SPAMers site. So when they post "see <https://bogus.com/dodgypharmacyproducts>" on many more reputable sites, Google will see it on all those more reputable sites and then move <https://bogus.com/dodgypharmacyproducts> higher up search results as other links to it make it appear "more reputable" in Google's eyes. So I suspect they may not be targeting us to go gambling in Vietnam but targeting Google/Bing/etc. to rate then higher in search results.

Just a few thoughts that may not be possible/appropriate.

Ian

On my personal web site any accesses from anywhere in Russia, China, in fact 24 countries are blocked as over time the level of attacks (trying to get into admin, trying to get at the database server, etc.) were becoming such a nuisance I gave-up even blocking networks and decided it's only a personal site so if genuine interest from those countries is blocked, so be it as I can't be spending forever stopping them taking over the site. 99% of the time the accesses were hack attempts not even looking at published pages.

The list of countries is interesting when I read press reports of which governments are accusing which other governments of attacking each other.

Ian