Drunkard's Walk Forums

We only have 15 "guests" trying to force their way into the boards today.

I've noticed the number of new accounts on the freebie wiki has been dropping lately, too.

Maybe they've figured out there are easier pickings elsewhere?
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Nah.

Looks like another surge, maybe - just now I saw "4 users, 1 invisible, and 52 guests." Or maybe every search engine just decided to update their crawl of this site at once...?

Yeah, this surge started about, let's see, maybe two weeks ago, I think? We were down to thirty-some "guests" at a time, and then it ramped back up over the course of just a few days.

My guess is that with the end of First Quarter coming up, they're desperate to show some results to their customers. Or their "investors".

And a brand new surge -- after months of an average "only" 50 or so "guests" at any time I'm on the boards, It's suddenly spiked back up into three digits, with over 170 on the boards right now as I type this, and the new "record" for simultaneous users also being hit today:

Quote:The most users online at one time was 301 on Today at 02:52 AM

This corresponds neatly to a sudden flood of content spammers on All The Tropes over the past couple days.

How many actual members are there on the board, just by way of comparison? I know I rarely see a post by anyone I don't recognize, but even with the relatively recent transition needing people to re-register I'd expect there are quite a few who aren't very active. I've tapered off and vanished for months at a time more than once myself I'm pretty sure, between connectivity or hardware issues and a couple of gaming sprees that took over every free minute while they lasted.

From the Board Statistics block at the bottom of the top-level directory page for the boards:

Quote:Our members have made a total of 176,903 posts in 12,877 threads.
We currently have 176 members registered.
Please welcome our newest member, Owen
The most users online at one time was 301 on Today at 02:52 AM

And I just noticed that that record was exceeded early on Saturday morning:

Quote:The most users online at one time was 306 on 01-04-2020 at 04:11 AM

So I guess it wasn't exactly end-of-year rush to close out old contracts...

What the heck happened last Friday?

Quote:The most users online at one time was 821 on 2020-08-21 at 16:23

Nearly triple the last posted maximum...

Holy crap. Missed that.

It's a damn good thing I don't charged by the traffic I generate...

Isn't the end of the fiscal year coming up? They're probably scrambling to meet contract requirements or something.

DamnifIknow, but unwilling to say you are Wrong~~~~~!!!!!!!

At least all the layers of defenses I have in place seem to be doing a good job keeping them from doing anything but looking. It's very rare -- say once every few months -- that I actually get spammer who's gotten all the way to me needing to approve their membership. And of course I check their emails and IPs against various resources before I even decide to send the "tell me where you heard of my forums" email which is my last round of spammer-check.

Out of curiosity, has there been any change that looks like it could be related to the war?

Not really, no. I have several different defenses up that stop different things, and judging by their logs the spammers have mostly been constant over the past few months. Interestingly, I got four direct mail spam messages through the board's email system in the past four or five weeks (the first in a couple years), but either because it's broken or the San Felix skin breaks it, I get no notification of those and don't see them until I explicitly open up the relevant menu in the admin control panel.

And it's the end-of-year flurry again. While the "guest" counts haven't been terribly excessive -- 100 to 125 or so at a time, on the average -- the attempts to register accounts have been unusually high: four got as far as a successful "request for membership" on the admin control panel in the last week alone. That's more than I've gotten in the previous three months. They're pretty brazen, too -- multiple new accounts from the same IP submitted within a few hours of each other, actually using the name of the product they plan to shill as the user name... they've made it absurdly easy to take a quick look and "nope" them away.

they just set up bots to run then left for their Xmas holidays 8P

Makes sense to me.

And this morning there were two more new membership requests, both from the same IP address, both with ProtonMail emails (which the last few also had), and submitted an hour apart. StopForumSpam.com doesn't recognize the IP as a known spam source, but it's pretty obvious to me that they're would-be spammers. I sent the usual challenge letter, but I expect to be deleting the requests on Thursday morning.

EDIT: Another obvious clue for me is a new user requesting a username with a number on the end, like that imposed by Gmail and other services, and a period or other punctuation mark in the middle instead of a space. Makes it clear that they haven't actually read the boards and seen that there's no requirement for either of those things in a username.

It would appear that adding a link to the forums on the AO3 userpage for the KanriKyaraProject account is attracting the spambots. Got one yesterday, and two more today. Fortunately, they're easily identified such that I don't even have to send the usual challenge email.

It occurs to me now, as I deal with them, that we didn't get the usual end-of-year storm that we've seen in previous years. I wonder what that means...

EDIT: I'm also wondering how many just don't get by the challenge questions in the registration process -- and how many tried to register that two got through overnight. I also wonder if it's time to change the challenge questions to something a bit harder for the average spammer to get past.

Three more since I posted that, all spammers as identified by Stopforumspam.com.

I see somebody's asking for forum membership:

Quote:We currently have 202 members registered.
Please welcome our newest member, TwxqrpLot

Bob, when you send them the "are you a human" email, maybe you should ask how to pronounce "TwxqrpLot"...

It could be like Welsh which is allergic to vowels

My antipostdisemvowelmentizer returns "twix-kerp-lot" but then I go by Czlyydwr Llrngwl on SB & Co. and people call me "that guy who hates vowels" and so on despite having not just a phonetic version but two easy short forms right underneath it as a custom title, so I may be a poor judge of pronouncibility.

And you're all going to have to cope with the disappointment of never finding out... TwxqrpLot couldn't pass the IPCheck at StopForumSpam.com, so they don't even get the email.