Scare () writes:

A lot of what I've been doing at the Oz Report web site lately has been to control the activities of spammers and scammers. Their bots find any submittable forms on sites and submit piles of junk into them. The bots attack the Oz Report classifieds, obviously, and the Oz Report emailer via the encrypted email links (which protects the email addresses but is still a way for them to try and entice people to fall for their scams), and of course the forum, but also the Oz Report site search and any other inputs! Buggers. I couldn't look into a log file and not see piles of huge HTML- or bbCode-formatted ads! I guess they figure that whatever they submit might show up on a web page somewhere, or at least in a log file that the search engines index, all to get their "product" up in the rankings.

Now the Oz Report classifieds and the emailer and other forms on the Oz Report web site not only check for known spammers but also for newly-submitted spam, and automatically bans the SPAMMERS. We actually WANT them push their pharmaceuticals through our forms, or try to, because then it's the last we'll see of them, and them of us.

The administrators (Davis and Scare) have some new controls in the classifieds for manually banning spammers, in addition to the old just-delete-the-ad controls.

There are still some issues caused by the way our web hosting company runs the PHP interpreter as user "nobody" instead of the accounts proper user, which means that files and directories created by PHP don't have permissions that allow them to be manipulated through the FTP login, but I'm working around that.

There have been a lot of error messages showing up lately, sorry about that, but it's because I've been forcing the scripts into a stricter mode. Previously they would come up against things that would generate a warning condition, which wouldn't be shown, and would continue on as best they could, but in some cases that continuing would cause the wrong things to happen. Now every unforeseen condition is treated as an error and is logged for me so I can adjust the code to handle it correctly. I get to see errors that happen for anyone, not just one's I'm able to cause myself, and that means that I can fix them. For example, it's hard for me to debug what happens when someone (or more likely something) accesses the sire from an unresolvable IP address, when I'm coming from a perfectly valid one.

Discuss SPAMMERS at the Oz Report forum
   
 
 
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