UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Suggestions and Feedback Preventing Spamming via Private Message

Any tricks to avoid this?

e.g. hacks to permit only X number of private messages/day, or messages to X number of users/day, or some sort of logging of suspicious private message activity? Or other, more clever, solutions?

We have (like every one of you) a few crazies and sharks who hang around the site, who'd use PM to spam and stir up trouble behind scenes. Yes, we could wait till someone complains and then ban the user, but we don't want to wait till it reaches that point (and the bad guy would just sign up anew from a different hotmail account).

yes, maybe a limit, a quota. We have got some users using the PM system more frequent than their own eMail account I guess .

hmmm...well, we don't want to necessarily limit active PM users if they're just, like, talking.

I'm concerned with ads, spam, come-ons from competing sites, psycho rants, etc.

There've got to be solutions...perhaps just logging, etc. Anyone?

Are you looking for existing code, or just ideas?

It shouldn't be difficult to write a script which scans the w3t_Messages table, and produces a summary of messages which meet certain criteria.

The script could either be run on demand, or hooked into the cron table.

Possible criteria could be

1. X messages within a period of Y hours from the same user.
2. Same as #1, but limited to users who registered within the preceding Z hours (to catch people who register for the sole purpose of spamming).
3. Occurrence of words or phrases from a predefined list.

On my board, I don't have a big problem with private message abuse, so I'd prefer to get the summary report, review it, and handle problems manually.

Dave, thanks for the good suggestions. I'll talk to the tech guys and see if I can get them to write these sorts of scripts. I like your three-pronged attack approach, it makes sense.


"On my board, I don't have a big problem with private message abuse, so I'd prefer to get the summary report, review it, and handle problems manually"

forgive my ignorance...does ubbthreads currently provide a PM activity summary report? If so, how often?

thanks,

JIM

UBB.threads doesn't provide a summary report. That's what this custom script would provide.

ok, makes sense, thanks for clarifying.

If/when we get the script written, I'll offer it for the community. If anyone gets to it first, please give me a heads up, ok?


JIM