Mail.ru, ukr.net and Yandex.com email accounts banned

Yesterday around 20 accounts were opened with mail.ru or yandex.com addresses. All appear to be accounts set up to spam the site.

Thankfully things like the nursery period prevented the site from becoming awash with spam. Anyone curious as to how LFGSS might look if these defences were not in place need only look at the test forum where they are in fact not enabled: [ame="http://test.lfgss.com/forumdisplay.php?f=3"]General - LFGSS[/ame] . The place is awash with spam, not that it bothers me as I'll delete it once I'm done.

Anyhow... to preclude the possibility of those accounts being used to get past the defences that I've put in place, I'm simply going to ban mail.ru and yandex.com accounts across the entire site. I feel that this is OK as being a London, UK focused site I can have a reasonable level of certainty that a majority of our users aren't from Russia.

However, if you happen to be someone who legitimately has an email address from one of those providers, you will need to let me know your username and the email address for that username... at which point if you also give me a new email address I can change it for you (you won't be able to change your own email address due to being banned).

The easiest way to do this is to email me at david@lfgss.com from your existing mail.ru account and to let me know of the new email address I should use. This would verify that you have access to the mail.ru account, so I will happily update your LFGSS account.

Cheers

David

Oh, and since it appears there were also some fake gmail accounts registered yesterday... please be on the ball about reporting any spam that does get through so that I can nuke it swiftly.

It will be my pleasure :-)

To the nursery!

Just added ukr.net to the ban list.

The amount of spammers who are registering at the moment may lead me to temporarily disable registration.

Currently 1 in 10 new members is a real person, the other 9 are spam accounts.

...the other 9 are spam accounts.

What is the normal ratio of span to good?

Does this have anything to do with the Bot attack type thing just before christmas?

What is the normal ratio of span to good?

Normally on LFGSS it's more like 50 people to 1 spammer.

Does this have anything to do with the Bot attack type thing just before christmas?

There was a bot attack?

I think it's unrelated... I just think Russian spammers have started the new year with a new found vigour and have changed their targets slightly, which now includes us.

https://www.lfgss.com/thread48164-35.html#post1845119

I don't understand these things so it could have been you computer literate types being funny?

Well, at least the forum servers survived ;) Not much of an attack I guess.

The amount of spammers who are registering at the moment may lead me to temporarily disable registration.

Currently 1 in 10 new members is a real person, the other 9 are spam accounts.

Wow. Does the sign up process not involve some kind of captcha test? It's been a while.

It does. But they're actually using real people to register accounts. The IP addresses are all from Russia, Ukraine and Belize. I'm half considering bocking those country ip addresses since as we are a localised website this shouldn't impact any of our reals users. Seems a bit drastic though.

Not drastic at all.

Ban the Ruskies!

there's scorch though, he's from Ukraine.
I'm sure he'd be a bit miffed.

YES the day has finally come! Can we kick a few other herberts that slipped through the net off, too?

Poll?

1. Multi Grooves
   

The test site looks shite....

I'm going to block:
Belize
Kazakstan
Russian Federation
Ukraine

If scorch is blocked and contacts anyone... get him to visit www.whatismyip.com and have that emailed to me, I will exclude his ISP from the block.

you (or someone) should PM Scorch at least VB - his only contact with most people on here is through the forum - which if he can't get to anymore..

Will do... I'll email him now.

Cheers

His last IP was a USA one ;)

Emailed and PM'd... the block is now in place.

IP addresses for country blocks are being supplied by: http://www.countryipblocks.net/

And anyone interested in my block script, I've attached the Varnish VCL ACL.

1 Attachment

• vclacl.txt