birthday / user list spam

[Chrill]

I do like the general idea of the birthday list, I'd quite enjoy keeping it around. Especially if roboboy's idea works.

Just look how pretty it is when we have the time to clean it manually

[Purno]

But how would you know whose birthday it is without the birthday list?

When someone announces his birthday in the appropiate topic and is offering us cake.
And when someone isn't doing that... well... lets just say there's no point in celebrating someone's birthday if there's no cake.

I do like the general idea of the birthday list, I'd quite enjoy keeping it around. Especially if roboboy's idea works.

Just look how pretty it is when we have the time to clean it manually

Sure, when it's fixed and it works like intended, awesome little feature. But until then, I'd say take it down. Can always re-enable it when we found a fix. But in its current state... disable it.

[Voyager One]

TBH IMO we don't need that birthday list, and I'd say just disable it completely. We got a birthday celebration topic for those who want to share some cake.

Noooo. It's nice to send someone else a birthday wish and it's really nice when someone else remembers your own birthday.

lets just say there's no point in celebrating someone's birthday if there's no cake.

You're evil. A complete materialistic douche... You're the one who is supposed to give presents to a birthday boy/girl, not the other way round! No cake for you!

[Purno]

Noooo. It's nice to send someone else a birthday wish and it's really nice when someone else remembers your own birthday.

True, but TBH, I never check the birtday list anymore since it's always listing tens of spammers. I'm not gonna bother reading that whole list to see if there's a genuine username there. IMO the birthday list completely looses its goal as long as spammers abuse it.

You're evil. A complete materialistic douche... You're the one who is supposed to give presents to a birthday boy/girl, not the other way round! No cake for you!

I should report you for your tasteless insults, but I guess you just haven't discovered how tasty virtual cake is yet.

[Voyager One]

I should report you for your tasteless insults, but I guess you just haven't discovered how tasty virtual cake is yet.

So that would be my birthday present from you? A report?

[Transportman]

Indeed, with the current list of spammers in the list, it doesn't really invite to look at it to see who's birthday it is. Cleaning it up to have only the more regular posters (+10 posts) would increase its usefulness.

I should report you for your tasteless insults, but I guess you just haven't discovered how tasty virtual cake is yet.

GLaDOS, is that you?

[vear]

I know I'm kind of late with my penny but I fully agree with Kogut's suggestion, as harsh as it may sound to someone. I'd set the "n" number to 10 and even that is very low (50 would be even better). Think about it, an engaged user will reach these numbers in no time and others... sorry for being blunt... who cares.

That's fine in theory; in practice though somebody needs to modify phpBB to support that. It's something I may try to look into it shortly.

I suppose this won't take more than modifying a single SQL query. Both post count and birthday are stored in the same table IIRC, so it won't need a bloated JOIN, at most adding a single index of birthday+post count pair might come in handy if it isn't fast enough by default.

[orudge]

When I have some time (maybe on Friday night) I will see what I can do.

[WWTBAM]

I am making progress on my spam removal bot.

[Greyfox]

Bit of a bump! but I see the spammers in the birthday list are back.

[Zakos]

If roboboy has quit on his bot, maybe we can convince Owen to run the deletion script again, although it takes a mighty long time and the only thing that the spammers are hurting is birthday recognition.

[Greyfox]

Not only the birthday recognition, but the fact that they are using the forums for additional advertising, including some of a unsavoury nature. This we do not need.

[orudge]

I disabled one of our anti-spam protection mechanisms a little while ago, as it was prohibiting various genuine users from registering (and I got quite a few e-mails about this as a result). I haven't yet got a suitable replacement, unfortunately. I'm partially waiting to see how phpBB 3.1 performs in term of anti-spam. I'll need to work on an upgrade plan for the new version.

[WWTBAM]

If roboboy has quit on his bot, maybe we can convince Owen to run the deletion script again, although it takes a mighty long time and the only thing that the spammers are hurting is birthday recognition.

I haven't quit per se, I got a new laptop and lost two close family members so it is on hold. I am thinking about picking it back up again in the next few weeks.

[Zakos]

I haven't quit per se, I got a new laptop and lost two close family members so it is on hold. I am thinking about picking it back up again in the next few weeks.

I'm sorry to hear that; take your time.

[WWTBAM]

My project actually does some work now It gives me a list of birthday users it thinks are spammers based on criteria that I won't make public for spam bot authors to discover. It also opens all their profiles for me in my browser so I can investigate them. Today on it's first run it only left 3 spammers in the list for me to manually clean and there were no genuine users in the list it gave me.

[Alberth]

Nice work

[Voyager One]

Well done!

[planetmaker]

My project actually does some work now It gives me a list of birthday users it thinks are spammers based on criteria that I won't make public for spam bot authors to discover. It also opens all their profiles for me in my browser so I can investigate them. Today on it's first run it only left 3 spammers in the list for me to manually clean and there were no genuine users in the list it gave me.

Very nice. Thanks a lot

[WWTBAM]

My project actually does some work now It gives me a list of birthday users it thinks are spammers based on criteria that I won't make public for spam bot authors to discover. It also opens all their profiles for me in my browser so I can investigate them. Today on it's first run it only left 3 spammers in the list for me to manually clean and there were no genuine users in the list it gave me.

Very nice. Thanks a lot

I still have to manually close 40-50 tabs and ban them all for the time being but once I am comfortable that it isn't going to pickup a genuine user, I would like to give it the power to ban the users it detects. I am also thinking about giving it the ability to scan the member list once my spam user detection algorithm is finished and declared safe.