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wow. brings my recent battle with comment spam into a new perspective. i was poking around youtube to find some handy EE tutorials, i didn’t think i’d find this.

sorry if this video has been posted somewhere here, but i’ve never seen it before.

Title:
Expression Engine backlink software bot - generate thousands of backlinks with the touch of a button

spam bot video

i have been just using the normal captcha, but after watching this and seeing comment spam increase, i guess my tutorial searches will be on spam combat.

any comments on easy things to do to derail the bot before it strikes?

also, how does a bot, or a person, determine that a particular site has been developed with EE? is there a marker in the html?

one way of telling is through the way cookies and css files are handled. If you search in the Firefox add-ons for ExpressionEngine you can find an add-on that tells whether a site is using EE or not.

Things are about to get ugly for all of us that run Membership sites. As if things were not bad enough. I think this warrants a Friday afternoon blog post…

Arrrgghh that’s horrible. Well, sounds like its time to take out a little war on this software.

Wrote up a few things you can do currently to fight this…

http://eetemplates.com/index.php/blog/comments/a_primer_on_fighting_backlink_spam_for_expressionengine/

Nice article Marcus.

I looked up the owner of the domain and think I found him on Google Maps Street view. I really do dislike little herberts like this.

My first thought; this bot appears poorly coded terribly slow (despite what the guy says).

My second thought; this is pretty easy to thwart, as long as you either:
1) rename the /member/ path and do not link to the new one (use a custom form for member registration), or…
2) disable member registration for the default “Members” member-group.

This is one of the reasons we’re contemplating moving to a service like Disqus for comments. Not that there’s anything wrong with ExpressionEngine’s comment system, it’s just that no system is perfect and a service with anti-spam (which is consistently updated) would be easier than moderating comments for most clients.

A lot of what happens to us isn’t comments though, its people putting spammy stuff in their member descriptions that gets indexed.

I am thinking something along the lines of a delayed activation email if the signup contains anything with href links.

Temporarily, you could just prevent users from registering with a Yahoo email address 😉

Wow I just though to search on this after hearing about it on the EE podcast. Sure enough one of my sites has 200 fake members. Oh dear. This stuff should be locked down by default.

Temporarily, you could just prevent users from registering with a Yahoo email address 😉

It’ll be nice to know how this could be done. Could you explain this, please?

Temporarily, you could just prevent users from registering with a Yahoo email address 😉

It’ll be nice to know how this could be done. Could you explain this, please?

You can go to Members > User Banning > Banned Email Addresses and do so there.

Best wishes,

Mark

Indeed. Thanks a lot. 😊