StopForumSpam.com – Spotting spammers early and blocking them
The guys behind WordPress had the foresight and energy to create Akismet to help control blog spam, and the blogging world wouldn’t be the same without it. A popular web application like WordPress is a big target for spammers, since they can write bots to pump their spew into it. Akismet helps cut that problem down to size.
I was really pleased to see a cool site called StopForumSpam.com, created by Russ Jackson and helped along by Paul Lush. The idea of StopForumSpam.com is simple – make it easy for people to report spammers on their sites, so others can block them. It’s fast, free, easy to use, and I feel it can help control the damage caused by some of the worst offenders.
Over a half-million known spammers are already listed at StopForumSpam.com, and more are added every day. If you run a forum site you might want to take a look at the mods that are available for phpBB, vBulletin and simpleMachinesForum. There’s also an API available that is very easy to incorporate into your own application.
We liked StopForumSpam.com so much at DZone that we decided to adopt the site and provide hosting and support for it in our data center. Russ and Paul have been carrying the load all by themselves, and it’s a pleasure to be able to help them out in their worthy mission. StopForumSpam.com can’t solve the whole problem, but it can certainly be a piece of the solution. I hope it will be helpful to you!
Rick Ross
This is a great project and kudos to dzone for helping them out. However, there is an older project that’s also pretty cool and very effective called The Honeypot Project http://projecthoneypot.org/
They have a web and a dnsbl api and here are their current stats from today:
Trap Addresses Monitored
46,233,975
Trap Monitoring Capability
365,755,000,000
Spam Servers Identified
66,506,238
IPs Monitored
68,001,310
Harvesters Identified
81,103
Dictionary Attackers
10,403,460
Comment Spammers
312,528
They are a community supported project and are always looking for people to install their honeypot software on their websites and to donate subdomains to serve as email server honeypots.
More info on how to help the project out here: http://projecthoneypot.org/faq.php
You mentioned vbBB (PHP). SFS offers allot of support in the forums.
If you use ASP / .Net forum sites you can still use the data provided by StopForumSpam.Com group.
There isn’t much support for ASP/.Net users as of this date.
But, if you ask in the forums or search you’ll find other sites offering scripts that will work with some of the older forums like Snitz 2000.
Overall it’s a great group and it’s nice to see the creator of the project actually participates and is active within the forums.
On a side note: It’s not that important to store last years data on spammers due to the fact most change formats (ip,email,user) on a weekly and daily bases.
The key to the success of StopForumSpam.Com is actually it’s members that supply “Hot” first seen reports.
Spam one in the group and that’s it!
Search the forums to find your setup and Ask Questions!