Greetings all CZCC members. Many of you who visit the site during work hours here in North America will have seen some evidence of a spammer invasion today. So far today, there have been over 40 new 'members' joined today, solely to post all manner of spam on the site. Earlier in the day, they came mostly from (what appear to be) Russian networks. However as the day has progressed, I'm now seeing them from more local networks as well. I strongly suspect some sort of trojan-horse-bot going around and infecting un-protected computers. Can't confirm that, though.

I've been trying to sneak time throughout my day job to pop in and clean things up here. So hopefully not too much of this stuff has been visible for very long. I've learned the patterns to look for, and I have dealt with several of them even before their first post.

But at some point later tonight, I'm going to need to catch some sleep. And I suspect that overnight (North American time) these critters will join up and post en masse. Both Mike and Will (the other major moderators) are on the road, with limited online access. So there could be a pile of in-appropriate material on the site by morning.

If so, please be patient. Don't bother replying to any of them, just ignore them. If you want, you can report them via the 'Report post' button in the post, but I truly don't think that's necessary. I should be able to find and clean it all up in a few minutes once I get online in the morning.

Again, thanks for your patience as we try to keep this the best Z-car forum on the web.

a work around until vB fixes the leak...

TEMPORALLY: Require new users to post at least 5 posts before they can add links or pics to a thread..

We had an epidemic of these on the JNC forums too a couple of mths ago. Even with all the mods deleting/banning these things as they came up, they just kept coming.

What stopped it all, was an additional question on registration: What was the brand name used by Nissan when they first entered the US market?

That seemed to stop it once and for all. And let's face it...if you can't answer that question then you don't belong here anyway

a work around until vB fixes the leak...

TEMPORALLY: Require new users to post at least 5 posts before they can add links or pics to a thread..

A good sugestin, but unless that functionality is already inbuilt into vb it would be near impossible modify vb to do that in the short term. And you really don't want to go modifying software as it will all get deleted next time you do an upgrade, and you will have to modify it all again. It easiest to have stock standard installs, and let vb fix the problem. Finding the register page and putting and exit statement in it is alot easier and quick to undo.

Thanks guys! Along with running an update to the forum software, I also added a secret question that could only be answered by a human. The trick is to ask a secret question and then enter an incorrect default value. Bots don't know the answer, so, they'll always take the default (or enter their own random value). This prevents them from registering.

Let's just hope REAL people are smart enough to answer the question otherwise I'm going to get a TON of "how do I register" questions...

m

It was a free-for-all spam assassination... This was a problem on a global basis and there were thousands of sites affected. Free samples for all !!

good to hear, I have not had any issues the last couple of days after I added the question on my forum, I still see them visiting as unregistered guests trying to log in or register but without success

Try implimenting the honeypot. http://www.projecthoneypot.org/home.php

It redirects known spammer ip's to a "honeypot".