Forum Attacks

[Truestar]

I am a now inactive member of a website in which I used to be very active, back in the day another website decided to raid this forum.

About 5 members from this attacking website registered to this site, and started posting pornographic images.

No administrator was on at the time, and only two moderators were. These two moderators did the best they could, however there literally was hundreds of posts coming in by the hour in this event which lasted maybe 3 hours.

So the forum was filled to the top which pornographic images, and these 5 guys on the loose, if it wasn't for the fact an administrator showed up, the site could have taken days to clean up. The cooperative work of the administrators and moderators made cleanup a couple of hours.

Websites "attacking" other websites is childish, and sounds like something you wouldn't think happens, but it does, and I got caught in the middle of it. So what is your plan in the event your forum comes under attack? Do you have moderators on enough? Any administrators? How about censorship or link protection?
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[Patrick]

Interesting thread. Yeah, it happens. Idiots are everywhere. This is the kind of person I'd like to have the troll hack for. Yes, I'm confident that we'd be able to handle it just because of my resolve. It's very strong. I've faced attacks like this before. One time that I can recall is that there is a large martial arts community that doesn't like it when people that hold a certain view are allowed to express that view without getting personally attacked.

Of course, my martial arts community is built upon respect, so these people are allowed to express their views and anyone who disrespects them is warned/banned as necessary. Well, this other community decided that was not a good thing to do, so they decided to take matters into their own hands, so to speak, to force their will upon us. Their members created threads/posts where they encouraged their members to come over to my site and violate our guidelines and be disruptive. Their administrator allowed it and even encouraged it.

But, they came over, they did their thing and their posts were removed and they were banned. They did it and it was taken care of. At the end of the day, I'm not going to give up on my community. So, they can either give up or spend their lives on my websites, giving me impressions which just helps me to sell advertisements. But, I'll still be here either way.

I have some systems in place to help me to moderate the mass creation of posts and private messages. Post Remover for phpBB, for example. A few clicks and it removes all of their posts. It may hurt us for a little bit, but when we see it, it'll be taken care of.
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User Guidelines

[anyone4chess]

Hi

I am new to the site however; this is the solution I came up with on this subject.

After reviewing all of the methods to stop unwanted guests from logging onto my site and posting whatever material they wanted I realized that there was no method that was 100 percent from stopping this, I also realized that the time and effort it takes to delete, watch and ban these posts / members was becoming higher and higher.

I took a look at the problem from the point of view of the poster and asked myself why I am going to this site posting unwanted messages and providing unwanted links etc.

The simple answer is profit (ranking) etc, what is value on any forum, the ability to post and review member lists, group lists etc. These robots (humans writing scripts, persons) also don’t need to login your system as long as the can get access to you members information the well this can just as valuable to these groups.

I reviewed my forum from the point of review of someone finding my forum on the web and not logging into the system, what is available, what information is available that can be used. You would be surprised what information is available. To make a long story short I closed all avenue of gaining information by just viewing the forum. I decided to allow guests to view the forum, not the forum information, knowing full well this would not stop these people or robots from logging into my system (what I call the bait). After all these people are here to raise their ranking, why don’t I invite them in to help raise my ranking, fair is fair…grinning.

I moved into the forum as logged in member, I removed the ability to post (you must request) strange enough robots can not do this and humans writing scripts wont bother and they know why. I gave the real members the ability to hide their personal information and protect themselves if the wish. This approach is drastic, but it works and I can spend my time on issues I feel are interesting rather dealing with people or robots that want to waste my time.

I hope this helps someone.

--anyone4chess
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[Dog Cow]

That's a very horrifying thought. I think that depending on the scale of the attack, my staff and I could fend off something like that.

However, if the attack was as large as the one you described, then that would be a problem.

I had an attack similar to this a year ago. One of my happy enemies thought he would be clever to post a hate topic about me in every one omy forums. Well, it back-fired. I had about 4-5 loyal members defend me in my abcense and they told him to shove off. Needless to say, I was very proud. I had the offending topics evicted, and the moron banned.

I had another smaller attack a few months ago. One of the "British lads" from a competing web site (ha ha!) thought he would post these amusing 1200 pixel wide images in my topics, thus stretching the pages. Fortunately, I was online as the the little toe-rag was doing it!

No one can stop me. If they think they can attack my forum or flame me, or hack me, they can't. I'm cleverer than all of them put together.

I'll remove the content and hand out bans any day!
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[Nick]

[blaster]

I have never had this happen to me but have problems with bots and all. And i must say that my staff does a very good job keeping it under controle. There is usually at least one admin on at any time or a moderator.
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[dojo]

One of my mods is a close friend. She has the administrative passwords for all my 11 forums in case I need to go for few days. Otherwise in few hours my mods can handle all the stuff, not to mention I am daily in my forums
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Webmaster articles, tutorials and topics

[someguy]

I had once had my site attacked by an older moderator He did one thing when he was "fired" that he changed all forum titles with rude words.. well i did this.

1. Took snapshots of those
2. Took his PM archive n zipped it
3. Blocked his IP
4. Tracked his IP which was luckily same most of the times
5. Contacted his ISP
6. Faxed them n emailed them reports that a member using your internet services is going against your terms which is "I will not abuse the services provided"

The guy lost his internet connection from not only that company but they blacklisted him on another daughter company they had. So result was that this "kid" lost a connection from a company that had the fastest internet in his country..

So sometimes i guess you have to go through the extra trouble to teach a few a lesson that its not ok to mess around with sites that take this serious ..
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[Mark]

[Truestar]