Advertising deleted and account closed.

Administrator's reminder: There is a zero tolerance policy on advertising. There is also a zero tolerance policy to automated sign-ups and having more than one account.

Wow, a spammer got through!

First in a long, long time, that is for sure. I will have to keep a watch on account openings to study any trending patterns.

What the...?

You could do what many other sites have had to do, and that is to put a blanket IP ban on China, Poland, and Russia. They are unlikely to contribute anything positive to the site, and you'll eliminate most of the world's spammers & hackers.

... and delete this thread.

I don't have an IP database and at any rate the way IP blocks are distributed amongst the three regional authorities such a thing would need constant updating. Instead there are certain countries (and China will get added soon) where upon application the site says the applicant is approved for membership but in fact the application is refused. The application gets logged as an event but nothing gets added to the membership table in the database. That part of the member management system has worked flawlessly and whilst people can get wise and work around it, these stupid robots can't.

There's quite a few good things about this site and I wouldn't want to lose any of them. The top two are:-

1. The members, especially those who contribute so much in the way of information. It's a resource that will become scarcer with time unfortunately but for now, we all benefit from it.
2. The site's various defence mechanisms. According to the logs I mentioned before, this site, like hundreds or even thousands of others, gets smashed continually by the types of connections the OP is based on. A few are always going to get through but thankfully most don't. This wasn't always the case and about six or seven years ago I was manually closing hostile accounts almost daily and that took up a lot of time.

This brings me to another point - the Census. Last night the ABS website was flooded by a denial of service attack. The newspapers have gained some mileage out of it, permitting their commenters to blame everyone from the Commonwealth Government, accusing them of incompetence, to the Chinese, the CIA, the Russians, people smugglers and others. A website simply cannot be defended against a DOS attack, particularly when such attacks come without warning. Steps can be taken after an attack starts to reduce its effect but it is never an easy thing to combat. Whilst it is inconvenient it is the world we live in and people need to take site outages for what they are. If there is a server on the Internet it can:-

1. be flooded with malicious data to stop it being used legitimately, and;
2. be hacked and data stolen or destroyed, and if the hacker is skilled enough, destroy the server itself.

I've been lucky with this site. There's been a few chancers come here and flood the site in the past but most just stop and attack someone else when they realise that they aren't achieving much. Hitting bigger and more strategically important sites such as government or banking sites clearly is a more productive exercise for those seeking to disrupt proceedings.