Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Invasion of the pod people — we need your help!

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BMG has recently been hit with something of an invasion of spam users.  Apparently these are actual humans, since they go through the process of typing in the “captcha” on the signup screen and being emailed a password.  Typically, they then post a couple of spam links in their profiles.  Here’s an example from this morning.  I have deleted dozens of these accounts, but they are signing up faster than I can get rid of them.

For the most part, these pod people don’t put comments or user posts on the site, so they are little more than an annoyance.  However, they do occasionally venture onto the main part of the site.  When I see comments or posts from obvious spammers, I delete the account, but I can’t police all the comments on all the posts.

Hence my request: if you see what you think is obviously a spam post or comment (e.g., ones that contains a link to an advertising site), please let me know via email.  Let’s keep BMG as spam-free as possible.  Together we can!  đŸ˜‰

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Comments

  1. Any program can be hacked. I don’t think you have pod people, but a program such as Decaptcha.

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    p>Google “captcha hack” and you’ll get some idea of the ways around captcha.

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    p>Solutions wll be technical. My guess is that the soapblox platform has been hacked again. You might check with them or other people using the platform. I know WordPress comes with Askimet which is supposed to screen comment spam. It wasn’t until I loaded a better anti-spam product that I was able to keep myself spam free.

    • what about having to log in with an emailed password?  And then posting links in the profiles?  And occasionally writing actual comments?  Don’t those have to be humans?

      • leads to Sparkiecat’s blog.

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        p>This stuff is pretty high tech, and beyond me, but the hacks, including the ones you can purchase, are there.

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        p>I found a similarly puzzled spam victim here.

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        p>

        We have two possibilities here.
        1) spammers are using a script that can visually see the numbers in the captcha code and the script automatically posts a comment using the same text template.
        2) spammers aren’t “hacking” the captcha but rather they are manually entering their crap on people’s blogs and manually entering the captcha code (if installed) and using the same damn text template. My only question is “Is this one annoying spammer or dozens doing this?”

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        p>I imagine it’s “easy” enough to hack your password generator (or the file that stores them) and write a program to route it to through an email, execute the captcha hack, and then insert the spam. I’m not even close to knowing how any of this would work, but from what I’ve read about hackers, and given the commercial motivations involved, there’s probably motivation to do this stuff, even if it’s experimental.

        • weirdest spam ever.

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          p>I agree this would take a fairly sophisticated scripts to automate, but fail to see the value.

        • …but I’ve read that some of these ‘work at home’ opportunites is to sit and plant crap in comments on blogs and message boards.  Manually.  Over and over.

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          p>BTW – I hope sparklecat isn’t just fising for valid IT addresses, with the ‘blank’ blog.

          • in tUSA to make it work.  I could imagine using Indians to defeat captchas, but this… how many could you do in an hour?  How could that possibly be worth even $5?, given that so many of those posts get deleted soon enough…

  3. … in the ratings?   If I recall correctly, the ‘delete comment’ button was added after the fact, perhaps a ‘report spam’ button also?  Google mail has such a button, that seems to work pretty well.  

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