Spam attack

[daredevil]

Who invited spammers to gaming party?  Anyhow did some massive clean up. 

 

If any valid user who got caught in the fire fight, apologies. Please ask your team player to re-register once it gets open again.  

[daredevil]

Looks like lot of gmail users..  Seems like gmail / google being hacked doesn't help. 

 

Registration is open but through manual approval. I might add a field where we will ask which server you play on.. to help with manual approvals. However any of your known user having issue, please let us know. Thanks

 

PS Need to figure out better approach to this new spam wave since me spending 3 hr time every day is not possible... and on top staff hrs are different. 

[Shoresy]

Silly question, could requiring 2FA help? 
 

or establishing a timeout for new users to be able to post certain phrases like external links, phone numbers, or creating a new post all together until they’ve hit a certain number of comments or time since account creation? Similar rules to how we have it where they have to make 5 comments before being able to edit their profile? 

[Element']

I was doing a little digging about the Invision forum regarding spam…

They were saying about having the forum software up to date for spam prevention features which I assume we do.

What version of Captcha do we have upon registration? 

I read that “hCaptcha” might be more effective against spammers. 

Also as you said a Q&A might be a good option. 

 

[daredevil]

On 9/11/2025 at 8:12 AM, Shoresy said:

Silly question, could requiring 2FA help? 

 

A little bit. I can make that mandatory but problem is regular users are gonna cry because many users still don't enable 2 FA.

 

1) However, I have made it more prominent. We can use 2 FA matrix for admins approving new users. 

2) I took out lot of Proxy websites - millions in a go. 

3) Some countries are going to get challenge. Apologies for that but respectfully, lot of spam from few countries. 

4) Q&A 

 

Their is limited things, I can do for this non-sense gmail users who's account are hacked. Please mark them spammers. Billions of accts are compromised which this fkr's use and they create rest of gmails through automation. 

 

On 9/11/2025 at 12:13 PM, Element' said:

What version of Captcha do we have upon registration? 

 

 

https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/turnstile/

 

On 9/11/2025 at 12:13 PM, Element' said:

I read that “hCaptcha” might be more effective against spammers. 

 

That's horrible. Hence I moved to Turnstile but it's not great either. 

[Shoresy]

Yeah, it just had me set up Authenticator to sign in just now. I know it's not fool proof, but it should help some I'd imagine. 

 

At this point I would say either yeah do mandatory authentications or somehow make it, so they need approval if they wish to not use authenticator. Not sure how possible that would be? 

[daredevil]

17 hours ago, Shoresy said:

At this point I would say either yeah do mandatory authentications or somehow make it, so they need approval if they wish to not use authenticator. Not sure how possible that would be? 

 

That's not possible. I have put some extra measures We will get here and their but that crazy bots i.e. 200 in a day, has slowed down. 

[-=HipKat=-]

On 9/11/2025 at 12:19 AM, daredevil said:

Looks like lot of gmail users..  Seems like gmail / google being hacked doesn't help. 

 

Registration is open but through manual approval. I might add a field where we will ask which server you play on.. to help with manual approvals. However any of your known user having issue, please let us know. Thanks

 

PS Need to figure out better approach to this new spam wave since me spending 3 hr time every day is not possible... and on top staff hrs are different. 

Same thing I'm seeing on mine with more to clean up every week lately

 

I joined some of the anti-spambot sites, like stopforumspam, and added the APIs to my site, which helped a heck of a lot. . Plus, there's Project HoneyPot.

I can tell you the name if you think it'll work here but I assume you have things for that.

I started manually banning emails for each one. I used to ban 200 per week, now it's like 5, til lately it's like 15 a week

 

I also read that things like email approval and CAPTCHA, and things like that, are not very reliable since they can solve many of those pretty quickly now

Edited September 14, 2025 by -=HipKat=-

[daredevil]

Sadly IPS is all about $$ now  One of the best thing, I did for you is suggesting to use XF. 

[-=HipKat=-]

Just now, daredevil said:

Sadly IPS is all about $$ now  One of the best thing, I did for you is suggesting to use XF. 

I agree with you there. It's been a real good place to host a site