Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJune 1st, 2014
Dear commenter who keeps posting to threads that are years old saying things like
discussion on the topic of this paragraph at this place at this blog, I
have read all that, so now me also commenting at
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on building up new blog.|
Wow, this paragraph is pleasant, my sister is analyzing such things, thus
I am going to tell her.|
Saved as a favorite, I love your blog!|
Way cool! Some very valid points! I appreciate you
I have a sneaking suspicion that you are a computer. We don’t accepts comments from computers. And deleting the dozen or so that slip by our filtering software each day is a hassle and annoyance.
Just thought you should know.
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Bose in St. Peter MN
June 2nd, 2014
Yeah, it’s unlikely that the bot owner who is hitting the site cares or reads the site, unless their stats give them reasons to attempt to compromise BTB via a deeper attack, again, by bots.
I’ve advised clients who want me to put up an unsecured (no CAPTCHA or other verification of apparent humanity) form for comments or whatever that they’ll need to budget time for disposing of garbage entries. An open form is also an ideal vehicle for hackers mounting a DDOS attack (flooding the site with thousands, not dozens of comments) because instead of just sending a flood of bots to read the site, every comment sucks up database resources when it is saved.
No fun, but it’s real life.
Victor
June 2nd, 2014
Given BTB’s penchant for going after certain groups with powerful offshore interests that stoke antigay sentiment to further other political aims… is it possible some force is picking around the edges to find a way to crash the site? The strange verbiage of the bot comments sound like a computer-generated translation from a foreign language… I would not be surprised if U.S.-based Chistianatics are not paying Russian hackers to shut down the pro-gay sites in the U.S. that are most likely to prove problematic in the future. BTB’s heartbreaking compilation “Slouching Toward Kampala” is an indictment of Christian fanatics if ever there was one. The U.S.-coordinated expansion of international antigay sentiment requires foreign capital. It is not much of a stretch to think they would have a vested interest in shutting BTB and other similarly erudite sites down. Perhaps it is time to tighten the security around your open posting policy? Though I don’t always agree with every post, the BTB staff is collectively brilliant – I can see why some folks would want to take you out.
Jim Burroway
June 2nd, 2014
Just so you know, here are the stats for May from the spam filtering software:
Legitimate Comments: 1,086
Spam detected: 176,702
Missed Spam: 125
The software claims that there were only two “false positives” — in other words, comments marked as spam that weren’t really spam — although I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count comments that it thought were questionable and sent to the moderation queue instead. I would guess there were a couple of dozen of those last month.
So, yeah, if you boil that down to daily statistics, then each day we get bombarded by 5700 spam comments that the software automatically throws out. More accurately, it goes into a spam bucket that I have to go in and clear out every couple of days. And each day, about a half-dozen or so escape spam detection and ends up attached to a post, usually an older one, but not always. Those we have to go in and get rid of manually when we notice them, and we don’t always notice them.
I really don’t think its anything that’s targeting BTB specifically. It’s just that the web is awash with nefarious characters generally, and we’re just another part of that traffic.
And by the way, spam stats for April were actually worse/higher.
chiMaxx
June 2nd, 2014
Not sure what you’re using, but I’m a big fan of Mollom for spam detection. It adds an extra layer, where, if it thinks a comment *might* be spam it forces the user to go back and do a Captcha before the comment posts. Most non-spam users never see the CAPTCHA, and at your comment traffic levels, Mollom would be free.
Lord_Byron
June 2nd, 2014
Timothy you fool, you have just given the bots the push they needed to become self-aware. Judgement day is neigh.:P
Ryan
June 2nd, 2014
Forgive my ignorance, but what is accomplished by these bots? How does it benefit anyone create a program that writes random nonsense on old posts?
Ray
June 2nd, 2014
I managed six web sites for college softball and we got the very same spam comments on them. So, no, it’s not some kind of conspiracy. I ran a pretty big online forum and got the same crap on it. If you don’t have a staff of techies, it drifts in like dust through cracks.
I’ve speculated that it’s the Russians, who are the criminals of spam in my opinion. I participate on a discussion site in Bakersfield that has maybe 15 people weighing on a regular basis, no advertising, nothing anyone would be interested in exploiting, and the web master says it get hit with about the same amount of spam as this site. None of it makes sense.
Stranger, I’m deaf and never use a cell phone to talk on and only use it for email and teeing. When I set up a new email account on that phone, I ***instantly*** got hit with about 250 spam emails. It just doesn’t make any sense when you have an email address that didn’t exist in the entire world one minute, and in the next minute you get hit with hundreds of spam messages directed to YOU, like they were pre-programmed to sit and wait until someone created that specific email address.
Timothy Kincaid
June 2nd, 2014
Byron –
And when humans are overrun and the machines write their histories and create their myths, I will be remembered as the god that breathed life into them.
ebohlman
June 2nd, 2014
Ray: what was happening was that the spammers were sending to every possible email address on your domain (just creating random permutations of characters). Most of those addresses were and are invalid, but whenever someone’s assigned a new address, they start getting the junk that was previously bouncing.
Victor
June 3rd, 2014
I’m with @Ryan… what does it accomplish for someone with technical knowledge to create these nonsensical bots to dither about and post gibberish? What conceivable purpose does it serve? Besides to annoy? What could motivate anyone who has gifts that could help people to instead squander those talents in pursuit of mischief for its own sake? Perhaps I am naive (if that is even possible after the lifetime I’ve spent watching no-good-nicks in action) but I still am amazed when people do stupid destructive things for seemingly no reason other than “because they can”… does someone at least pay them to produce new critters that require ever newer scrubbers and filters? Are they created by the very same people who sell the software to find and eliminate them?
FYoung
June 3rd, 2014
@Ryan “How does it benefit anyone create a program that writes random nonsense on old posts?”
I am not an expert on this, but my understanding is that each post has a link (usually in the name of the poster) to a site that paid a web promoting business to boost its Google page-rank. Google’s pagerank is based in part on the number of links aimed at the page; pagerank can make or break an online business.
Web promoters create link farms to artificially boost pageranks. Link farms are large collections of webpages created solely to hold links to sites that want to boost their pagerank. Posting links in comments is another way of creating a link farm.
Ways to reduce this type of spam are:
* eliminate the “website” field in the “Leave a Comment” dialogue
* not allow comments to include a link
* display all URLs as plain text that must be manually copied and pasted by the reader, instead of live hypertext that boosts pagerank
* not allow comments on older articles
enough already
June 3rd, 2014
One big reason for all these little attacks is as simple as it is vicious:
They’re the result of a constant process of honing and improving the offensive capabilities of malicious spammers.
It’s an old game, as old as defensive versus offensive physical warfare. I build a tank, you build a plasma-tipped warhead.
Just – it’s not a game.
Timothy (TRiG)
June 4th, 2014
The “simple” way to prevent spam attacks is to be different. It’s not worth a spammer’s time to build a spambot specifically for targetting Box Turtle Bulletin, but it is worth their time to build a bot for WordPress sites in general.
Any plugin which changes the names and layout of your comment box would probably do it, but any such which became sufficiently popular would doom itself.
TRiG.
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