Well this is an annoying development. Now the forum spam bots seem to be targetting other threads, in addition to making their own..

I'm getting so annoyed with spam lately. Spammers will end up forcing the net to do a lot of "Whitelisting", making the Internet more private and much more controlled.

Why can't we just change the subdomain prefix to make it harder for spammers to target?

As in lose the obvious forums.lusternia.com, and change to community.lusternia.com, or aethercast.lusternia.com, or globglob.lusternia.com, or whatever.

Or the mods will continue to quietly clean up after them.

People steal cars. Did we all revert to walking? People burn down houses. Do we all live outside? People copy music illegally. Did professional musicians become a thing of the past?

No, but I see it becoming an increasing concern, especially where e-mail and other messaging services are concerned. I can see message boards going the same way. Spammers are becoming more common and with viruses and bots and other things as well as the "unmetered" state of the Internet and it's international makeup (thus having "safe havens" for spammers outside the law), it's going to get worse before it gets better.

The White listing and Privatizing theories are likely to become more common.

Let's review our notes ten years from now. I don't want the Internet to change too much, but I can see it happening.

On another forum, using the same software, the admin noticed that all the spam bots use the highest IP ranges. After checking through the database none of the normal users ever came in those IP ranges thus those ranges were simply banned. Haven't seen a spambot since then. I know our user database is a lot larger, but should take a simple SQL query to check it.

The ranges the bots seemed to be in on the forum I talk about:
200.0.0.0 through 209.255.255.255
220.0.0.0 through 229.255.255.255

I just looked up some IPs of the ones that have been spamming us and there's no such correlation. Too bad.

No, but then can one write a script to

-find car
-steal car
-loop and repeat

?

Its really not a problem. We can clean up the spam just fine. And maybe forum mods can get a credits like guides for every spam we delete!

Listen to you folks. It's like you never need Cialis from Guatemala.

Yeah, those are some good ads these people are putting up. Tax Service over the web from some unknown company that uses bots is sure to be secure!

You know what I love the most about spammers? The fact that they so totally don't care who they're sending stuff to. I mean, every day my email at home gets five or six spam emails asking me if I'd like to add inches to my male genitalia using various forms of lingo ranging from medically accurate to incredibly vulgar... And I laugh and laugh cause I'm a girl! Silly spammers!

Hey, what do you know, Daganev made another post I agree with in the space of only a couple months! (he can even quote me on that!)

Email spam is dead. Standard filters, Bayesian filtering, and strong cryptography killed it. Only a moron using a dumb email provider and a low-grade email client gets spam nowadays, since the precautions against it are so simple.

Forum spam is a reaction to this, as is increasing the volume of spam. The amount of people that actually buy V14GR4 per spam email sent is dropping, so they mail more. The amount of Usenet users is going down, too, so they spam web forums.But they can't keep this up forever; sooner or later, web forum software will become more resistant to spam.

I'm just lazy...

If you still get spam, I'm wallowing in GMail invites right now.

I've got two gmail accounts, it's my other email account that gets all the spam... and just cause I just delete it instead of 'reporting' it and getting it blocked.

But thank you for the offer!

It's so easy to say "technology" will take care of it, and I do use Gmail more. However, spammers are working as hard as the anti-spammers--they are finding ways around it. It's delusional to think it's over. It's just gonna get worse, as they work to defeat it. I have a feeling more radical approaches will be necessary. In some cases, the anarchy of the 'Net--the "tragedy of the commons" might be its own undoing.

Just because there are spam filters to hide it from your eyes doesn't make it less of a problem. I've seen what it does to my companies' servers, for instance. The fact that you even have to set up such filtering is treating a symptom, not the problem. You shouldn't have to change an e-mail account every five years or stupid crap like that. The fact that ordinary e-mail lists and the like get filtered out also is stupid.

I think changes will come when either (1) Spammers get prosecuted so severely it makes it very hard for people to want to do it and/or (2) More White Listing, privatized areas of the Internet, etc, will take over--maybe whatever eventually replaces the Internet.

A lot of :censor: gets through Gmail's filters these days.