Invasion

[wtnhighlander]

Yet another question that only an Admin can answer.

[Coop]

Looking at who’s online at 9:32, cst, mods will have their work cut out for them tomorrow. 

[Beechwood Chip]

On 6/3/2025 at 10:34 PM, Coop said:

Looking at who’s online at 9:32, cst, mods will have their work cut out for them tomorrow. 

Well, anyone who comes to the site through a search engine would be a guest, I assume, and also all the search engines and "legit" AIs (like ChatGPT) will also appear as guests.  Search engines and AIs usually create many copies of themselves to search many branches of a site in parallel.  I'm not an expert on this stuff, but it might just be that Google decided it was time to refresh it's scan of our forum, and spawned a zillion connections to do it.

I'll check back in a bit to see if there's any new spam.  It's been really quiet for the last hour or so.

[wtnhighlander]

Yeah, the "guests" are probably fine. Its those weird usernames that keep dumping TEMU trash.

I did see a place in the Moderator Tools that will reveal the IP address the spammer connected from. That usually just gets as far as the ISP that owns the IP range, but does raise the possibility of posting an abuse complaint with the ISP. Unfortunately, when I looked into it, the spam was coming from different IP addresss, all across the globe. Driven through some address-obscuring VPN like tor, I assume. It would take a lot of complaint forms to generate any meaningful action.

[Tom King]

On the Havaneseforum that I participate in, there is an Introduction forum where new members are required to post in first before they are given permission to post anywhere else in any of the other forums.  I have no idea how that all works, but it seems to give pretty good results.  I think you have to make a first post, get that responded to by a moderator, and then make a second post answering that one before you can post to any of the regular forums.

Everyone understands it's to avoid robot posting.

[Chestnut]

On 6/1/2025 at 7:45 PM, wtnhighlander said:

Yet another question that only an Admin can answer.

Can you (the moderator group) please possibly raise a question with the admin about implementing a change of some sort?

I'll admit my traffic to the site has reduced because of all of this.

[Beechwood Chip]

On 6/5/2025 at 11:48 AM, Chestnut said:

Can you (the moderator group) please possibly raise a question with the admin about implementing a change of some sort?

I fired off a message to Marc and Nicole.

[Chestnut]

4 minutes ago, Beechwood Chip said:

I fired off a message to Marc and Nicole.

Thanks, the other trouble is what the change should be. As we don't know what is in place we can only speculate on what is possible.

It'd be nice to have moderation on first 3 posts, but that is a lot of work for moderators. It'd be nice to make someone wait 10 min between posts for their first 3 posts but would that solve the spammers as they already tend to have 5-6 min between spams.

I've had accounts require moderation before I've been able to post. It never really bothered me, but do we want to do that as it might turn away a new poster?

I don't know the answer. What I do know is that all of you moderators and admins require a HUGE THANK YOU! from all of us peons. Your work is not missed and it is appreciated. We don't thank you enough.

[Mark J]

2 hours ago, Chestnut said:

HUGE THANK YOU!

+1!

[Von]

I hope this comes across as constructive as intended.

I know the mods are working hard cleaning out the spam as it arrives, but my impression is we don't seem to have identified a path forward to reduce it. It seems like a lot is riding on Marc as the (only?) admin, who I suspect has a lot of other things on his plate running his business. Frankly, I'm starting to worry about the health and future of the forum. It's value has already been eroded from my perspective, certainly on mornings like today.

I think several of us, myself included, have IT background and could organize ourselves and try to help with this. It's not clear to me that would be helpful and welcome, or would we be just adding more cooks to the kitchen so to speak.

In short, I'm volunteering time to help with this if useful and if we can sort out how to work with someone with admin-level access who can help us understand how things are set up and make changes.

[Beechwood Chip]

My thought exactly.  When I emailed Marc and Nicole I offered to become an admin.  I haven't heard back.  

I vaguely recall an announcement post from Marc, maybe back in the 90s, where he said he was stepping back from adminning the site and turning it over to someone (I forget who).  But that was so long ago, I have no idea what the deal is now.

This forum is not a money maker for the Wood Whisperer enterprise, and I believe that they also have Facebook and probably other social media channels to manage.  

So, it makes sense that this forum should be adminned by the people who (still) use it.

What's your IT background?  I was a unix sysadmin at a major university for 30+ years.  I managed customer service, email, spam, web server, etc, etc.

[Von]

On 6/7/2025 at 9:49 AM, Beechwood Chip said:

What's your IT background?  I was a unix sysadmin at a major university for 30+ years.  I managed customer service, email, spam, web server, etc, etc.

A bit of everything. I started in networking in the early 90s, shifted to infosec as the WWW emerged, led software development for a while in the 00's, and ended up in infosec management for the last two decades. Mostly at UIUC and IU with a stint at U of Chicago.

[Mark J]

I caught " aaaushi34544 " just as this vermin was starting to post.  I reported the first 3 posts over 3 or 4 minutes.  I waited around to see if my 3 reports would kill it.  There were 2 more posts that came through over the next w minutes.   

So I'm not sure if my reporting 3 times stopped the spammer, but the other 2 posts were already in route, or if one member reporting 3 times is not effective. 

[Ron Swanson Jr.]

Are these human beings or bots doing this? Does anyone know,?

[Beechwood Chip]

On 6/12/2025 at 9:24 AM, Ron Swanson Jr. said:

Are these human beings or bots doing this? Does anyone know,?

I assume they are bots.  Which means that they won't get frustrated and stop doing it.

I banned a bunch before I went to bed around midnight, and a ton more around 6:30am, so there were only one or two just now.  I'm going to be AFK most of the day.

It's been a week and I haven't heard back from Marc and Nicole.

There are a three solutions I've considered:

• I could write a python program to automate what we're already doing as moderators.  I already have the design worked out.  There are a few problems with that:
  • I don't have much experience with Python, I don't have any experience developing software on a Windows machine, and I don't have any experience doing this sort of web programming.  So there'd be a steep learning curve.  Realistically, I'd like to hire a friend to help me through it.
  • We end up with a solution that only I understand, that's running on my home computer.  So, keeping it running, maintenance, etc would depend on me.  It's a kludgy, ugly solution.
  • It would only catch the most obvious spam, and would need to be updated as the spammers adapt or new kinds of spam show up.
• I checked, and starting a new forum in Invision Community would cost upwards of $50 per month.  I expect we'd have to pay more to get better spam protection.  We could start a new forum with better spam protection, but it would cost.  And, we'd have to get everyone to switch, and we wouldn't have the archives, etc.  We'd be starting from scratch.
• Wait for the current Admins to fix it, or give @Von and me admin access.  This is by far the best solution.

[Ron Swanson Jr.]

On 6/12/2025 at 8:51 AM, Beechwood Chip said:

I assume they are bots.  Which means that they won't get frustrated and stop doing it.

I banned a bunch before I went to bed around midnight, and a ton more around 6:30am, so there were only one or two just now.  I'm going to be AFK most of the day.

It's been a week and I haven't heard back from Marc and Nicole.

There are a three solutions I've considered:

• I could write a python program to automate what we're already doing as moderators.  I already have the design worked out.  There are a few problems with that:
  • I don't have much experience with Python, I don't have any experience developing software on a Windows machine, and I don't have any experience doing this sort of web programming.  So there'd be a steep learning curve.  Realistically, I'd like to hire a friend to help me through it.
  • We end up with a solution that only I understand, that's running on my home computer.  So, keeping it running, maintenance, etc would depend on me.  It's a kludgy, ugly solution.
  • It would only catch the most obvious spam, and would need to be updated as the spammers adapt or new kinds of spam show up.
• I checked, and starting a new forum in Invision Community would cost upwards of $50 per month.  I expect we'd have to pay more to get better spam protection.  We could start a new forum with better spam protection, but it would cost.  And, we'd have to get everyone to switch, and we wouldn't have the archives, etc.  We'd be starting from scratch.
• Wait for the current Admins to fix it, or give Von and me admin access.  This is by far the best solution.

Chip, 

I appreciate all of these options and will gladly pay my share, or contribute to out sourcing a fix if option#1 is the winner. Thanks for all you do here. It's an endless fight. 

[difalkner]

On 6/12/2025 at 8:51 AM, Beechwood Chip said:

give @Von and me admin access.  This is by far the best solution.

+1 on this option

[Von]

On 6/12/2025 at 9:51 AM, Beechwood Chip said:

There are a three solutions I've considered:

Chip,

I find this forum very valuable and am happy to contribute to whichever route makes the most sense.

I'm glad you've looked into pricing. I hate to suggest throwing money at things, but too many times I've seen trying to save money end up costing more, so it's good to know what the "throw money at it" option looks like.

I can help with python and web programming, but Windows not so much (I use Mac and Unix). If we could find a Windows expert, I think we'd have all the bases covered.

I think we're to the point we could broach with the Spags breaking away and being a self-governing community. I wouldn't want to do that if they didn't want it, but I can't see any reason why they maintain this site any more except for our benefit (the tie to the WoodTalk podcast seems to be long broken), so it makes sense to me that we should bear the burdens.

Von

[curlyoak]

I'm glad that we have the brain power that are willing to step in! Thank You! If logic dictates and it is affordable I'll chip in. Is it likely with the right remedy it would be once and done or will more cash be necessary? 

What is the motivation for this invasion? I cant be a money maker...

 

 

[Beechwood Chip]

On 6/16/2025 at 8:13 AM, curlyoak said:

What is the motivation for this invasion? I cant be a money maker...

Oh, it's probably a big money maker.  First off, a few dollars American goes a long way in many 3rd world countries. 

Second, the target of these spammers are dormant forums that don't have any active moderation, and probably no active readers.  The idea is that AI Chatbots like ChatGPT will see these posts, and then when people ask "where can I get a Temu discount" or "How can I reach Coinbase customer service?"  they will answer with false information that they saw thousands of times on various random forums, and not with the real information from the legit website.  AIs don't have a concept of reality, so they don't understand truth.  They just answer the way they see lots of stuff on the internet answering.

Now, the posts here don't really help the spammers, because we delete them before the AIs can see them, but since the posts are being sent automatically, they keep coming anyway.  The spammers probably don't check to see if the posts get deleted, they just create a new account, post five messages, and then repeat the next day.  Since it's a computer program, it will keep posting here whether we delete the posts or not.  There are probably programs that search for forums, see if they can create an account, and if they can they add it to their list of forums to automatically spam.

There are plenty of dormant forums that don't have active moderators where these spam messages will pile up and be ingested by the AIs.

Sorry for the long rambling explanation, but it's early and I don't have the brain power to make it short and pithy.

[difalkner]

They also get paid for posting their links, not necessarily for click-throughs or views.  So if they can post five and those get deleted it's no skin off their collective spam noses.

[Mark J]

Beechwood Chip's explanation is doubly sad.  Sad for what it does to forums and sad for poisoning AI.  

[wtnhighlander]

Not to sound intentionally spiteful, but AI shouldn't be trusted, in any case.

I don't trust even a system trained on data that I personally curated. Look up any insurance actuarial (sp?) tables to get an idea how far you can trust even 20 years of "training" a NATURAL intelligence to drive a motor vehicle, for example. Then hop into a self-driving taxi and hope for the best.

FYI, I saw a news vid on Youtube, just yesterday, telling about China's new driverless  FLYING  taxis...

[Ron Swanson Jr.]

On 6/16/2025 at 7:50 PM, wtnhighlander said:

Not to sound intentionally spiteful, but AI shouldn't be trusted, in any case.

I don't trust even a system trained on data that I personally curated. Look up any insurance actuarial (sp?) tables to get an idea how far you can trust even 20 years of "training" a NATURAL intelligence to drive a motor vehicle, for example. Then hop into a self-driving taxi and hope for the best.

FYI, I saw a news vid on Youtube, just yesterday, telling about China's new driverless  FLYING  taxis...

This is off topic, but as a trucker, I've been listening to people ask me "arent you at all worried about self driving trucks taking your job?" for years. 

 

No. No I am not. 

It's 2025.

We don't have autonomous....

-Airplanes. 

-Trains that run on a track. 

-Cargo ships. 

 

So no, I'm not worried about a computer taking a rig through a dynamic urban environment, or through a mountain pass. Maybe someday, but not today. And certainly not before i hang up my spurs. End rant. 

 

 

 

[Coop]

On 6/16/2025 at 8:11 PM, Ron Swanson Jr. said:

This is off topic, but as a trucker, I've been listening to people ask me "arent you at all worried about self driving trucks taking your job?" for years. 

 

No. No I am not. 

It's 2025.

We don't have autonomous....

-Airplanes. 

-Trains that run on a track. 

-Cargo ships. 

 

So no, I'm not worried about a computer taking a rig through a dynamic urban environment, or through a mountain pass. Maybe someday, but not today. And certainly not before i hang up my spurs. End rant. 

 

 

 

Can you imagine how many more billboard and tv ads of lawyers riding on top of 18 wheelers with sledge hammers we would see?