Due to the recent surge in inappropriate messages from spam bots using .cn (China), .ru (Russia), .pl (Poland), gmx.co.uk (UK) and UK, CA and Australian Yahoo accounts, users with email accounts from these free email address providers have been temporarily blocked from joining the forums.

This ban does NOT affect previously registered users.

The ban affects users with the following domain names in their email accounts:

* gmx.co.uk
* yahoo.co.uk
* yahoo.ca
* yahoo.com.au
* .cn
* .ru
* .pl

Please use another email address or contact Winstep support if you are a legitimate user with an email address described above and you wish to participate in the forums while the ban is effective.

Thank you,

Damn Australians

Hehe.

Wait, you mean that this forum is not for p0rn?

Can't you implement some verification scheme where people need to do something only after receiving an email and making a reply or something?

Hehe.

It's been there since the beginning. Unfortunately it's an ongoing war between spammers and anti-spamming schemes, with the later clearly losing the war. PHPBB2 boards use email address validation and visual captchas, and it still is not enough. Some spammers even 'employ' what is called 'bio-bots' (i.e. other humans) to bypass captchas, etc... it's a whole world out there!

It's becoming a big problem. People willing to pay slave wages in far away placesc to place spam by hand. The more traffic the board gets the more you need to work to remove it. I'm surprised there are not more cell phone spams here.

This is an old thread but if you upgrade to phpBB3 you can stop spamming in it's tracks. I've not had a single spammer/bot sign up since doing so...

Thanks for the suggestion, John!

I'm always a little weary of updating the PHPBB version of this board because of server side file permissions that are out of my control - usually I have to get the BasicLink guys involved as well.

Sad to see that that is the issue. As I'm currently enjoying the trial of WinStep, I'd like to contribute. Money is sadly an issue, but I was hoping that I could contribute by hosting the forums (and giving you the access you require, such as full FTP permissions to the subdomain as well as phpMyAdmin access to your database), for free.

I can help with moving it all over if required, as well as installing and configuring the forums (as I got experience with phpBB3 as well as a couple of other board scripts, not just as moderator but as owner, installing it myself and installing the modifications available on the phpbb.com website). If you can get a SQL database backup, it's very likely that we can preserve the posts too, so you won't lose the posts.

I'm sorry if you would view this as spam. I'm just hoping to contribute to a project that I like.

Hi Kutagh!

First of all, thanks very much for your offer, but I'll have to politely decline... However 'difficult' it might be to update the PHPBB version, the forums, as well as the Winstep web site, are never-the-less hosted by the professional (and extremelly dedicated) company that is BasicLink - and I'll keep it that way, since I have nothing but praise to say about them throughout all these years.

What I've been noticing recently is that keeping the 2.x version of the PHPBB forum software instead of upgrading to 3.x has actually been a blessing in disguise. The amount of 'bot' infiltration attempts have decreased sharply in the last few months, almost to a negligible level. I guess this is because the code behind these 'bots' has now been updated to deal exclusively with PHPBB 3.x forums.

Anyway, once again, thanks for your kind offer.

Yup... I just got a spam email from this forum... It directed me to a scam/virus site ((

Luckily, I use NOD32!!

Seems the spam bots have now changed tactics: they now create an account and, instead of spamming the forum, spam its users via PM.

Unfortunately PHPBB2 doesn't have any tool to prevent users from sending mass private messages. I am being as agressive as I can in banning the bots (banning their entire domain) but, alas...

Anyway, I just banned the culprit, which deletes the message from the user's message boxes. Thanks for the warning!

Jorge, I don't know what you were referring to, but I did receive an email notification about a new PM, but nothing shows in my inbox. Was it a fake notification, or did I really fail to read someone's legitimate message?

That PM was from a spambot, and got deleted by Jorge before you could read it.

kutagh, thanks