Spammers... Oh, my god... Here are very much spammers.

[stefan_pavikevik 0]

These days on the forums, I saw some spammers.

Here is one proof:

This is not first attempt to spam. This is 3rd time they have spammed me. And not only me. This is happening to other users, too. My friends have also told me that they had the same problem with this spammers.

So please, do something to prevent this and please ban this spammers.

I am really sick of spammers such as this.

[jlhaslip 4]

Member Bans and IP bans are in effect for that member.

[Spyda 0]

Yeah Ive been recieving a large number of emails that are like this. They are simialr to that of emails that I usually find in my spam box for yahoo mail. It doesnt really bother me that much, these people arent going to trick me in to making myslf give them valuable informatino. I do find it umuorous that they are still trying though

[Veradesigns 0]

Member Bans and IP bans are in effect for that member.

thank you guys i had a scare thought my message inbox was giong to get full of spam like my email.

[The Simpleton 2]

Well in such a large and popular forum like this there are bound to be such problems...it is indeed very difficult to keep these spammer at bay since they always find new methods to get in and trap gullible people. I'm glad we have users like stefan_pavikevik who not only ignore the spammers but also report them too!

[k_nitin_r 8]

Hi!I've got one of those messages too. I just ignored it since it only happened to me once. I wonder if anybody even responds to those messages."I am Ibrahim Ezekuel from Nigeria. A dude died and he has this huge sum of money so we want you to illegally transfer it for us. We need access to your bank account. You'll be rewarded appropriately." Yeah, right!Regards

[truefusion 3]

I always find it a bit comical when they send a personal message to a staff member. But these events imply that there is a person registering these accounts, unless the bots have become very advanced where they can get passed most captchas. However, in either case, i am uncertain how a bot would interact with the forums or if a person did all of this manually. It is possible that there are bots out there that were made to analyze certain specific forums only. Since programmers and user interface designers tend to follow patterns in their designs, one may expect common sense phrases like, "Send Message" or "Send PM," et cetera for many, if not most, versions of the scripts released.But one would have to figure out if the bot (assuming it is a bot) dives into a topic to search for these things. I would say that would be a method done as a last resort, since the index page should be enough. The reason why the index page would be enough is, i would say, due to the fact i previously mentioned: that there is a design pattern for these scripts. The design pattern here would be the simple URLs, in this case being the member's URL: <username>-m<memberID>.html. After navigating to that page, the chances of finding yet another specific pattern are increased if not assured. If we follow this assumed pattern that these PM spam bots would take, then we can get a hint on the times they generally attack based on the members they attack, since people often have a general sleeping pattern.But to talk about more on the member's profile page, whether or not JavaScript is required to expand the drop down menu (i.e. on this version of the forums) is irrelevant if the bots can parse HTML. An alternative to displaying these menus to prevent bots from accessing the contents of these menus is to have JavaScript fill the element with the content upon click. The only way, then, for a bot to access this information is to become more advanced or for a human to be doing all of this. Though it is a lot harder to prevent a human from doing all of this manually, we can at least annoy them, just like they annoy us, with these extra measures we can take.

[rob86 2]

I haven't received any spam messages on this forum yet, which is good, but I expect to receive some sometime as I get spam on smaller forums. Spam is really annoying!

[The Simpleton 2]

Bots are really becoming more advanced day-by-day isn't it? Back on another forum which I moderate I have to deal with 2-3 spammers every now and then and it's always annoying to meet them! I noticed that in their profile page under personal information they have their username in 4-5 fields - this is a sure indication that they are spammers....I don't know if that applies to this forum also, but both the sites do use the same software...

[k_nitin_r 8]

Hi!@truefusion: My view of bots is that they target a specific forum engine (like Invision Power Board, in our case). A co-worker built a bot which simulates mouse-clicks within a browser so I doubt using Javascript would help, but I do think Captcha is the most efficient way to keep bots away. Optical Character Recognition systems are getting more advanced, but I doubt they can do stuff like tell you what is in a picture or solve a riddle Eg. What film is this picture from? What goes moo?Regards

[The Simpleton 2]

Can bots solve maths problems? Some sites have those instead of captcha codes. what is 2+2 and simple things like that...I always wondered if bots can get around this. If no, then I think everyone should dump captchas and use these, because some captchas are ridiculously difficult even for a human being to recognise!