Using hyjacked forum to created banbadword list

leatherback

Hey Guys..

Was wondering if we could have a hypothetical chat..

I have a forum which I did not control properly (What else is new).. Anyway.. THe forum is swamped with posts about how I can get all sorts of bodyparts adjusted, and if that fails, there are always pills to buy.

I was wondering.. I want to create a bad words list. What would the risk be of taking the forum tables, creating a mysql index for the content, retrieving the index, and using that as a list for the badwords? Would that work? Is there a way to control the number of times a word has to show in a database before it is entered in an index? There are very few real posts (<1%) of the database. So I figure I could use the top 90% of work occurences?

I'd appreciate your thoughts on this. Also.. If anybody has DONE this.. I would very much appreciate any insights on how you went about it.

MarkR

Your first action should be to prevent NEW spam posts- either moderate posts, require users to be registration, or even implement a CAPTCHA (which should really be a last resort).

After you've blocked automated postings, you can then consider bulk-deletion - this could be done on the basis of keywords if you can see some which appear, or if there are particular web sites which appear in many spam posts.

One option would be to scan all posts for URLs, then find the most popular X URLs from that list, manually filter out any legitimate ones, then remove all posts containing any of the remaining ones.

Although they can mis-spell V-Iagzr4, they can't get their own site's URL wrong as the link wouldn't then work.

Mark

leatherback

MarkR wrote:
Your first action should be to prevent NEW spam posts- either moderate posts, require users to be registration, or even implement a CAPTCHA (which should really be a last resort).
Mark

🙂 Thx for your concern. All appropriate actions have been taken on the forum, with in the last month no new fake posts. I basically deleted the whole thing, as I had given up on the thing anyway. (It was wsomething which had been running crap for almost a year).

I do however have a backup, so just wanted to see how I could use the experience, and create a usefull filter for my webapps. Also email forms etcetc. The odd one still manages to hack into my forms, and I now have to adjust my security every once in a while. I Dont like it, and I might just take the high road, if you know what I mean.

Roger_Ramjet

Trouble is that as fast as we come up with one way to stop them they find another way to succeed. Even gmail spam filtering gets bypassed occasionally and the crap gets through to my inbox.

As to urls, I had some 'cheap software' spam coming through and did a search on them: they were setting up a new domain name every day. My guess is that the whole thing was a scam and the downloads useless - the prices were just too cheap to be true. Why else the new domain names? Grab your card details and away they go. Easiest thing in the world to use all the free domain space out there to redirect to the real site so you'll never see the true url.

Still worth setting up a banned list but don't expect it to stop them.