The Petra Zone

Need to quit frequenting this stuff anyway. The bunnies bots are a bother. I am going to keep up to date with John's site, Bob's site and Josh's. Sue, you have my number. Call me if you and Johnny boy need help with anything. I will do whatever to help. Tell them thank you for the card for me.

Just so you know, there is a new law in effect that requires employers to record your internet activity, to cut down on hostile activities against us all. So, if your employers come here, they will see the bunnies links and will be asking you questions.

My computer is an open book for the church I work for, as I do my audio and video work at my home studio, so, I can't risk anything that even LOOKS like evil on my part.

Please take remove my name and password Micah, or whoever the boogie man is around here.

Brent

Ok, I'm in the process now of getting Michael and maybe some others complete admin access here.

Sorry -- I've been fairly busy for the last couple months ... lots of projects, getting engaged, etc ...... so I haven't been following how bad the problem is.

Michael, your email is bouncing!!!

The IPs you gave me are blocked with IPtables for now.

so maybe no more bunnies spam for a while!

micah wrote:Michael, your email is bouncing!!!

The IPs you gave me are blocked with IPtables for now.

so maybe no more bunnies spam for a while!

Honestly, Micah, we really need to have a captcha in place to deter the bots, or some invisible form fields to prevent them from creating accounts. phpBB should have the feature, and it's probably due for an upgrade sometime soon anyway.

I don't frequently post (not enough arguments with teeth, I guess ), but we really need to get a handle on the problem.

I agree, a captcha would be good. I don't know how easy it is to install, but I will try to take a look soon, or Michael or someone could do it.

I must admit that I don't worry too much about it.

If you don't want to watch, don't click. Ther's bunnies all over the internet anyway so if it scares you, you might as well sell your computer or disconnect it to the internet.

Leaving the zone until the problem is solved would be at bit overreacting, if you ask me. It's very easy to see if it's bunnies or not, so feel free to stop clicking.

The problem isn't not clicking what you don't want to see as much as the signal to noise ratio. (Some might argue that there's more noise than signal without the bots, I guess, but that's neither here nor there.)

There's no good way to separate the two easily. I'm almost certain captcha addons exist for phpBB that can be setup with a minimum of fuss, and they would essentially eliminate this problem.

I've started aggressively banning IP addresses from posting. One spam post and you're out. This won't kill the spam problem completely, but it should slow down the tide a bit. The iptables block that Micah put up should help stem the tide a bit too. If you should happen to get banned, anyone... first scan your computer for viruses and spyware, and then email me and give me a heads up. I'll have my email not bouncing soon.

Michael -- yeah please do fix your email, I tried to send you login info for the server itself.

I have a fairly important project this week (getting a program for a radio station in Arizona for their donor drive!) but let's do work on installing the captcha deal ASAP.

If you guys can get it installed, that'd be terrific. Another possibility would be to institute a probationary period for posting, so that new users couldn't post, e.g., for a week.

I have a trouble ticket in on the email problem, so hopefully it'll be fixed very soon...

Well, I've been banning IP addresses like crazy, which is a losing battle in some ways but it seems to be cutting down on things a little bit. I've also been setting up some "word censoring"... for example, you may now see threads for "Britney Spears Brutally Cuddled!!!" You know what "Cuddled" is replacing! I thought we'd all rather get a chuckle from that then get to see the F-word on a Petra board before it gets deleted. So most swear words have been switched out with something harmless, and maybe even sometimes vaguely humorous. Don't click on the links, though... they're still the same. I don't think links can be auto-censored.

You'd think they could at least come up with links other than the Britney links... Those have gotten to be pretty old. Thanks for dealing with that MJ.

See this thread for updates.