Yesterday (2012-09-19) was a biggest spammers invasion I saw (more than 250 accounts) in the our forum.
Akismet, our spam protect system works near perfect and deflect almost all attacks.
But I saw big bold spam tags above topics list and can't delete them. Why? I don't know. Maybe Trixar_za or mojo done the job later. I was not able to delete or rename tags, all still unchanged or returns back. I think this is because blocked topics was still have spammed tags and new spam topics was revive them.
I don't know how the blocking system works. Read in the account editor:
Inactive users can login and look around but not do anything.
Blocked users just see a simple error message when they visit the site.
Its seems like already blocked accounts shows in the bottom of the forum title page as online members!
I decided to poison them ;D
I wrote yet another bot to process most annoying spammer in the world originally from South Korea (remember xxxxxxx19xx accounts?) Bot logs in the forum as me, then reads account links from the bottom of the title page, then filter only that xxxxx19xx accounts. Then, if this member have not posts (Akismet kills spam) I will poison them! I clear all fields, fill 'Interests' with 'SPAM' word, define member as Blocked, marked as Bozo and fill password fields with $RANDOM :B
Now spammer can't log in to his account. And today I yet not see yesterday's "friends". I'm almost happy.
Ok, now I plan to write yet another micro-bot to clear 'Web site' field in the blocked accounts. Why I need it?
Web bots (Google and other) can index our forum title page, then follow links in the bottom, read page with spammer account and find link to external "bad" site. Better I clear it (I repeat—only in blocked accounts, so don't afraid).
