Eagles International Forum

Hi folks

Overnight we got hit by a huge spam application attack. I had over 70 applications in the past 11 hours and as I was changing the our rather unique spambot countermeasure questions, we got 11 more. Hopefully our new questions will stop the attack.

It takes me a couple of minutes to check out each legitimate application and perhaps double that for questionable applications (have to decipher the "whois IP address lookup" information to see where the applicaton came from). As a result, I had to take the "emergency" action and delete all of the applications. It is possible that I deleted one or more legitimate applications.

If you applied for forum membership in the past two days and have not had your account activated, please re-apply for membership.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

Jim

A bit of rambling from the resident geek.

When a person applies for forum membership, the spam bot counter measure consists of a random question that consists of numbers and letters with the statement to ignore the numbers and type the letters. We chose to use that process as opposed the obnoxious captcha questions/pictures that are so hard to see.

There are three questions one of which randomly show up for each application. It is fun to watch the spam applications (many form Russian ISPs) pick away at the finding all of the questions. It will start with a few applications per week. Once I see that they are getting close to getting all three answers, I reset the questions.

It appears to me that each of these applications are made by humans. Once they get a feeling that they have the questions covered, they submit it to a computer and I will get well over 100 fake applications in one or two days.

If I catch it quick enough and update the questions, I avoid the mass spam applications. However, I did not catch it quick enough this time and it was a mess.

Since I changed the questions after this last burst, I have not had one spam application.

I sure wish I knew why they pick on this very small forum. Must just be the challenge. Maybe the word Eagle attracts some attention. Who Knows?

Jim

Very curious