www.ofhills.com

is there a way to tie shoutbox into mt-blacklist?  or even mt 3.0b?  if not, i think you should devote all your time, free or not to that.

It may not be necessary Tien. I worked on this for a few minutes tonight, and the fix is pretty easy, at least for now. We’ll see what happens. The number of spammers seems limited, as well they should be, considering how stupid a waste of time it is, cf., the time-wasting I espouse here ...

Shoutbox Spam and the red hot poker
I was on the verge of taking the Shoutbox off the site. I was. A good 75% of all the posts it received were not so subtle links to sites that professed to offer pictorial representations of acts that were...

Nice one. Have added it to my Shoutbox code. With a bit of luck that’ll stop the b****rds.

Oscar...you’ve done it again!!  Seeing that not atangonizing people has never been high on my list of priorities, I’m hoping that leaving in the line you suggested changing, is o.k. with you.  I couldn’t have said it better myself .  Thank you so much Oscar!!  This seems to be working like a charm

Hi Maggie! Of course you are welcome to make use of my pre-fab charm (both senses of the word) (I’m flattered that you like it, btw, since so few really do). I offered alternatives because, as we know, offended spammers can target people and make their lives miserable. So I figure peaceable types might just want to block the spam nicely and be done with it. For those of us who are always up for a good fight, however, then I kinda like my original message myself!

ShoutBox spam pissing me off - here's a fix
Good morning Oscar has come...

Well, I got rid of my ShoutBox censor (I’d forgotten it was there). That’s much better! But the spam arms race has already started. The last batch was to this url:

http://www.mt-forum.com

Looks like you need a referrer to get there (that is, you can’t just type in the url - it must be a click). And then it redirects you to a fine bestiality site. Like that’s where anyone wants to go. Are people REALLY into that??? Who??? I mean, outside of a prison?

Anyway, I have added “mt-forum” to my list. We’ll see how many domain names they have registered ...

Think I’ve now added 4 or 5 more to mine Oscar!!  Its still a great fix you thought up.  You are so right about the mentality of these people though.  IDIOTS to the tenth degree!!

Hey thanks Oscar. I’ll go implement this as soon as I’m done with all the chores I’m procrastinating on right now.
Thanks a ton.

Spam and Eggs
I've had my shoutbox up for quite some time now and in the last six months the spam has gotten out of hand. I took care of that problem today. Thanks Oscar....

Here’s a new one for you..

incsx .. Got 2 of these this morning. I’m having fun with this block. Thanks a ton!

Yeah, I got those god damned ones too. Thanks for reminding me!

Oh, and also, I have come to fear that this is an automated program they’re using. If so, a human will not be treated to the little statement that comes after a blocked post. Ah well, can’t have everything ...

Alas, Oscar, that would suck if it were automated. However, perhaps said automated program has a bad case of rejection sensitivity.....
And don’t forget HAL from 2001: “Dave, what are you doing, dave?”
-Liz

2 more for you

boys-1-time
xcumfiesta

You should have a spot just for us to add new ones of these.

Yes, Rachel, that’s a good idea. I’ll see if I can set that up somehow soon. It seems they may have limitless urls, but I figure we’ll just keep growing the list.

I’ve worked on some shoutbox code in the past and as with most of you i’ve been hit with the shoutbox spam problem.

I’ve got a few suggestions on how we can tackle this problem better:

We need a pooled location for all the URLs. It’ll be easier to set it up when that one file is updated people that “refresh” their local list will have the full list

Also people should be allowed the option of having local lists.

A way to achieve it is to “require” two files one for the pooled list and one for the local list.

I could have a stab at this but i though you might wanna do it yourself.

Hi Faf! Thanks for the ideas, and the spirit of cooperation! Please feel free to implement this if you have the time and inclination - it sounds great, but between trying to keep up with Netflix and the rest of my life, I fear I might not get to it for awhile.

Everytime I get spammed, I add the key url fragment to my own code and also to the sample I have posted, but they may be endless. I suppose we should also try to figure out how the spam bot works (maybe someone knows this already). I assume it searches for expanded.php, and uses that. So we might think of renaming key files like expanded.php. Believe I’ll change mine to f_u_spammer.php, just in keeping with my original post.

Anyway, thanks again for the ideas, and let’s all try to collaborate to keep the shoutbox workable!

Thanks for this, great work!

I’ve already changed the name of my expanded.php but it’s had no effect.

Someone on the Webfroot forum was about to talk me through renaming the form fields which apparently helps. Also adding a hidden field with a unique name is supposed to help.

I’m a complete PHP dunce so I’m not sure how to go about it.

theaardvark.

Shoutbox-Spam List Manager
For the past few months i like many other Shoutbox users have been getting spam shouts on our boxes. The most annoying thing being links ot porn sites being used as the poster's URL. Oscar of ofhills.com came up with a solution to reject shouts that ha...

Ok, visit http://www.dotfaf.com/v2/entry.php?title=20040518_shoutboxspam_list_manager.

I’ve setup phase one of my proposal. Now you can add to the list without tampering with shoutbox.php.

Yes! Fantastic. That’s how it SHOULD have been done in the first place! Great work.

Amazing Job!! Thanks so much for this fix. The admins have been trying to figure out a way to stop them for a long time, but they haven’t been able to come up with anything that worked yet. thanks so much!

I believe that spammers manually spam since they have nothing better to do than make money off affiliate programs so they probably have the time to manually search google for blogs/shoutboxes to get improved results. I know that for sure, as the number one result for the term hentai is a spammer, and the link trader oscar which serps number 2 has ever since put a lot more ads since he converts far less now that he lost the number 1 position. The only way to kill spam is to deny pagerank via “NOCACHE” in meta tags.

Hmmm, interesting. I never really thought that part of it through. BTW, I thought the NOCACHE meta tag prevented the browser from caching, and had nothing to do with what the spider does with a page. Is this wrong?

Hey this is great. Adds another layer of protection. In addition to this you should also ban by a part of the IP. ie:
$banned_segment = array();
$banned_segment[] = ‘213.161’;
$banned_segment[] = ‘213.93.’;
$banned_segment[] = ‘194.135’;
foreach($banned_segment as $banned) {
$ip = $_SERVER[’REMOTE_ADDR’];
$ipsegment = substr($ip, 0, 7);
if($ipsegment == $banned){
echo “You have been banned! Silly spammer kicks are for trids”;
exit();

This does block ranges of an address, it is also looking at the first 7 characters of an IP, simply add more lines beginning with $banned_segment to add more to the array. This gets added to viewshoutbox.php and expanded.php, right at the top.

Oscar, Just played with your shoutbox and noticed that the words your matching against are in the URL. You should also add the check to the name edit box as they could simply put in an IP number instead of the URL and use the name field to relay the intent.

Thanks Jeff. Yeah, I have an ip banning code in my ShoutBox also (Can’t remember if it came that way or I added it as a hack), but I haven’t found it helpful since all the ip’s seem spoofed.

As for the url, they haven’t taken (yet) to using ip’s in the url, and have generally put innocuous crap in the text area along with a porn url. Hence, my current code. Since I don’t want to do one lick of unnecessary work, I figured I would “drive off” each of those bridges when we get to them, i.e., when my pals the spammers start spamming that way.

As we saw today, there seem to be limitless url’s to spam with. But, I figure if my code slows ‘em down a little, then great. I am still completely mystified as to how these links pay off. Especially if the spams are manually entered! Seems to me these guys would be better off with a job, but what do I know? Anyway, I hope my code decreases their effective hourly wage. That’s my goal - economic sanctions

I bet it’s the creators trying to get the community to come up with an effective ban solution

I dont believe IP banning works much anyway.

If they ever take to using IP addresses as thier URLs, i’ll just ban any “urls” that dont have only numbers in them after the http:// bit has been stripped.

I dont know a lot of people that have numbers only sites and if they do… too bad.

That will be the simple solution but there could be another way of finding out whether a string IS an ip address or not… eg. by stripping the http from it, then “splitting” it by the dots (.). If we get four parts… then it is an ip address. so eg. 193.45.34.67. split it using the . as a separator. we have 193 and 45 and 34 and 67. It’s four items.... must be an IP address.

I dought a lot of non spammers will be caught out this way.

Yes, I agree. For whatever reason, the filters have not altered the spammers behaviors - they keep doing the same thing, with many many urls, and that’s it. Part of the reason it seems like a bot, but who knows?

Shoutbox Anti-Porn Hack
My hats off to these guys - Oscar and Faf for helping put an end to obnoxious Shoutbox spam. It was becoming almost a daily routine to delete the crap the spammers were posting, and I considered taking my SB down for good. Just in time - Oscar created ...

Ughh bad bad spamer.. make me soo headache.. i try to add some of url from that spamer, coz rtoday they are shout again in my shoutbox, this is totaly of my anti spam :

if (preg_match ("/teenz|gotovoyeur|anal|adultpersonality|i-twinks|greatlatina|camsweb|ebonyz|boys4you|b-d-s-m|rape|webcamss|xdrow|adult-chat|anime1|secureroot|adultnonstop|xxx|fetish|porn|maturex3|matur|snurl|ayke|01j|manga|ra-pe|insest|banned|passion|mt-forum|xmen|ayke-halder|reallydope|richirich|seex|sex|hentai|kissvibes|only-php|lots0cash|beastiality|cock|teen|tits|member|full-access|incsx|anti-trust|inc-diary|qooqle|milf|nigritude|romance|onzin|gay|violent|penis|xsonnerie|bestiality|satisfaction|incest/i", $url)) {
$error = _SPAM_MAN;

BTW thanks for ur script, its soo nice

I linked this post through to the Webfroot Shoutbox forum.
Visitors: you may want to look there for other / further solutions…

Ok the spammers have a new strategy:

they still use urls but dont link directly to porn sites.

You may get an innocent link like donnas-site and if u bother to check u’ll find what is a seemingly innocent single page site by some donna “something”. on inspecting the source however, you find a lot of links to porn sites etc.

one characteristic of these sites is a tendency to always show a link back to the page u came from though i’ve come accross one tha was very professionally made.

if fooled me enough that i didnt bother looking at the source.

Also i’d advice u guys not to post your current ban list on here since all u’re doing is drawing a lot of porn hits here as well as unintentionally promoting the spam sites if it’s included in ur banlist.

On a side note, i have about 56 keywords now in my personal list and will be willing to send it to anyone that is interested:

mail me at paakofi+shbox @t gmail.com

if people seem interested in integrating their lists, i might get to work on a more efficient way to do it as i might have menioned in earlier comments

Yes, thanks Faf! I’ve seen this too, and DID go and inspect the source when I realized there had to be SOMETHING up, and now I just delete anything I don’t recognize. You’re also right about posting the lists. I’ve been meaning to remove mine for awhile now! Thanks for the info!

Thanks!! Fantastic~!!