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admin

Smoking a Pipe Right Now
Staff member
Nov 16, 2008
8,764
4,932
St. Petersburg, FL
pipesmagazine.com
I thought this might interest one or two people. There are A LOT of things that go on behind the scenes here that only Lawrence, Jason, and Ben see, and a few more things that only I see.
Here's one example of a forum spammer from last night / early this morning.
A year-old thread got bumped, and the spammer thought she was being clever by actually participating in the real discussion. However, her signature had links for Viagra and Levitra.
Lawrence caught it, and deleted it. That makes it disappear for normal forum members, but mods and I can still see it highlighted in pink as shown below.
spammer.gif

The thread she posted in was about eating healthy foods -

http://pipesmagazine.com/forums/topic/healthy-foods-you-eat?
You'll also notice that I can see the ip address, which is from India, where a lot of spam originates. (They speak good English, are educated, and work for the equivalent of minimum wage if you need spammers.)
I delete the user account, and then block the ip address as shown below, using the .htaccess file on the server. This will give that person a blank white page when they try to access the site.
htaccess.gif

On average, I spend about 1 - 2 hours a day during the week, and perhaps an hour over the weekend dealing with administrative duties. I think it's probably the same for the moderators.
I normally have 2 - 4 emails each day from the guys. Usually they are informing me of stuff they have already taken care of. They usually snag several spammers each week before 99% of you guys even realize it.
There is the occasional policy question I have to rule on, but for the most part, the forums are kept clean, safe, and fun by Lawrence, Jason, and Ben - all nearly invisibly accomplished.
In the administrative backend for the rest of the site outside of the forums, we get about 10 spam comments every single day. The system catches them before they get published, and I delete them.
Here's the first 4 from this morning -
spam-comments.gif

There's also server back-ups, redundant hard drives, load balancing, and most importantly, LOTS OF PIPE SMOKING!
I nominate this post for the most boring one ever.

 

topd

Lifer
Mar 23, 2012
1,745
10
Emerson, Arkansas
Boring or not, I like to see what's going on behind the scenes. One of the other forum sites I used to frequent

(not a pipe site) is absolutely eat-up with spam, and makes the site no fun at all. I don't go there as often as

I used to. "Thanks for all you do guys!"

 

sjpipesmoker

Lifer
Apr 17, 2011
1,071
2
What i want to know is who would actually click on one of those and buy something?? I'm sure your credit card will get charged, you won't get your items and they'll keep charging you??

 

bigmike

Part of the Furniture Now
Apr 24, 2012
518
4
Thanks to each of you for your efforts to keep this forum

one of the best I have ever seen.
Keep up the good work and I agree, "Raises All Around" !!!!

 

mluyckx

Lifer
Dec 5, 2011
1,958
3
Texas
:worship: to the mods....
I get three or four daily spams on my site, which uses wordpress as well, and my site is not anywhere close to being this active or high-up in the search engines. I can imagine the crap you guys have to deal with in the back-end. Thanks for the hard work.

 

puffy

Lifer
Dec 24, 2010
2,511
98
North Carolina
Thanks Kevin,and thanks to the moderators here as well for keeping this site so that those of us who want to converse in a friendly atmosphere have a place to do so.I've left forums in the past because the posting became so objectional that I just couldn't enjoy it any longer.Thanks also to those who post here for making this such a fun informative place.I really enjoy being a small part of it.

 

bentmike

Lifer
Jan 25, 2012
2,422
37
Kudos for a job well done Kevin and mods! I hate spam. (And I try not to use that "H" word too often if at all.) :puffy:

 

lankfordjl

Part of the Furniture Now
Sep 29, 2011
611
2
Texas
Thank you Kevin and moderators, because of your work this forum is like a virtual second home to many.

 

brewshooter

Lifer
Jun 2, 2011
1,658
3
All I have to say about that is:
Check out what I never thought would happen to me, it can happen to you too. I've been hoping you would join us in making this fun happen, just click my link.

 

admin

Smoking a Pipe Right Now
Staff member
Nov 16, 2008
8,764
4,932
St. Petersburg, FL
pipesmagazine.com
@Mick

I get three or four daily spams on my site, which uses wordpress as well, and my site is not anywhere close to being this active or high-up in the search engines. I can imagine the crap you guys have to deal with in the back-end. Thanks for the hard work.
Mick,
It used to be A LOT worse until I figured out some special technical stuff.
The spammers have programs that help them find Wordpress sites. Wordpress leaves a signature in the head of all the code. They also look for common file names for the sign-up page and commenting pages where they can create new users and spam comments with automated programs.
These programs can create 100 times more spam than the paid monkeys at the keyboards in China, Russia, India and a few other places.
The solution to avoiding the automated spam is to change the file names.
For example, the usual file name for the new member sign-up page is: wp-signup.php
I changed it to a unique name that relates to pipe smoking that no one could ever guess, and that the automated programs don't know.
The trick is that the file is referenced in a bunch of other separate files, so you have to find every instance of wp-signup.php and change it or the site will break.
I've changed the name of the comment files too. We used to get about 100 spam comments a day instead of the 10 we get now.
@sjpipesmoker

What i want to know is who would actually click on one of those and buy something?? I'm sure your credit card will get charged, you won't get your items and they'll keep charging you??
That's what makes it even more stupid. The English is bad, the comments don't make sense, and almost nobody would click on it ... but there are enough computer-illiterate and Internet-illiterate people that it still makes it worthwhile to collect their 15¢ per spam.

 

admin

Smoking a Pipe Right Now
Staff member
Nov 16, 2008
8,764
4,932
St. Petersburg, FL
pipesmagazine.com
We also use the Akismet plugin to filter out spam. Here are the stats for 3 years running.
Akismet has protected your site from 35,939 spam comments already, but there's nothing in your spam queue at the moment.
And it only catches about half of them.

 

docwatson

Lifer
Jul 2, 2009
1,149
9
New England
Amazing stuff goes on behind the scenes that we rarely know about. I don't have a clue about any of it or how it works. Thanks to all that keep this forum running so fluidly.

Doc :clap:

 
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