Hello all, Does anyone else have to deal with a spammer that's reported by PHPLD as coming from IP 72.232.254.74 (which is a spoofed address) and dropping recip links to arfroot.info domain? Wondering if anyone was able to spot the actual IP he's coming from? I'm seeing 211.138.198.7 195.175.37.70 147.243.236.60 Those only access a single page - /submit.php?c=xxx (category code, in my case - pharmacy), can be easily looked up using cPanel's "Latest Visitors" feature. Please post the IPs you spotted so we can block them all! Thanks!
Thanks for the tips, guys! I realize this mod exists and I also realized that I have not exhausted captcha's capabilities (only using minimally scrambled). A large part of my question was whether this is someone targeting my site or a wider spread phenomenon, so I hope some other directory owners will chime in here. Thanks!
Bots can bypass the captcha, while it is a pain for human's. I'd avoid using it, as it discourages submitters.
Human-assisted bots can solve (not bypass) a good captcha, not fully automatic ones. This is, of course if the captcha itself does not have a flaw that effectively disables it (by passing a malformed parameter to captcha.php or something like that). But that's just a bad captcha. Even if they advance OCR to the degree it matches humans recognition, I don't expect to be a target of such sophisticated assault. And in any case, it slows bots down which is also a positive outcome. I don't know about PHPLD yet but with other form submissions I have noticed drastic reduction in spam bot submissions after implementing the least scrambled captcha. Some still go through as they have people actually reading the captchas and feeding it back into the bots, but the most annoying ones that fully automatically flood you are usually gone. If you are trying to keep your directory clean to any reasonable degree, you've got to use captcha because otherwise the sheer number of spam submissions will cause you to miss a couple and include them which is exactly what the spammers want to do. What I'm trying to do is to create a list of IPs that bots come from most often and simply cut them off at the firewall level. So I hope someone can add to those three I've identified so far. There are actually more but I don't want false positives so I'm only sure about these.