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We are facing spam attacks

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Maybe, some people have noted that we are facing spam attacks since last night

http://www.physicsoverflow.org/13810/blocking-spam-ip-addresses

The spamming from unregistered IPs is getting worse, so I have (temporarily) set the permissions to post questions, answers, and comments to "Registered users", until we find a better solution for these issues.

If this does not help either, might even have to set the permissions to post anything to "Registered users with email address confirmed" ...

asked Apr 7, 2014 in Announcements by Dilaton (4,325 points) [ no revision ]
recategorized Apr 7, 2014 by dimension10

I think I have a better solution, but you'll have to wait, as I have a horrible internet connection since a few days.

commented Apr 7, 2014 by dimension10 (1,955 points) [ no revision ]

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1 Answer

I have fixed the issues and now let anyone post. The reason for delay is just my poor internet connection and database connect error becoming worse exactly at the moment that I try to save a setting and then they decide to clear all the changes (especially annoying for the "censored words" change).

I have did the following:

Enabled our ReCaptcha plugin; I have registered a new ReCaptcha key which you can see from Admin/Plugins. Admins: The private key should not be revealed to non-admins, please!
Added words used in the spam messages to the list of censored words. Never thought this would be useful! Don't worry, the spam messages used a lot of words in non-English languages (Spanish and Japanese) so I censored those words so anyone who tries to post these words cannot post the message. It is unlikely that users would want to speak in non-English languages here (right?).

But it is to be noted that I do not understand neither of these languages, so I can only hope that I have chosen common words. Anyone who knows these languages are welcome to comment. The spam posts are too messy for me to use google translate on them : (

I am actually rather surprised that we encountered this problem, Q2A uses a pretty impressive (to me) mechanism to stop spam (hidden URL fields).

answered Apr 7, 2014 by dimension10 (1,955 points) [ no revision ]

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