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#9871 xrumer ohhh, what a PITA

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Latest post by nicholas on Tuesday, 10 May 2011 15:24 CDT

Tuesday, 10 May 2011 07:29 CDT

slaes
hey nico,

what do you think about xrumer. I own a few phpBB and they just get pounded like its not funny.

to give you an idea over 2.3 million profiles in the last 48 hours. its annoying and i have tried everything, she's unstoppable.

im beez you know what, away from buying it, studying it and trying to work out how to stop it. However im afraid, very afraid i might be tempted to use it, lol, kidding.

Tuesday, 10 May 2011 07:54 CDT

nicholas
Friends don't let friends use phpBB3 ;) No, seriously, these dedicated forum web applications have the age of dinosaurs and the same chance of survival in the modern web environment. Their complete lack of architecture makes it impossible to secure them without rewriting them. I'd rather use NinjaBoard or Kunena any given day. Plus, both of them can import losslessly from phpBB3!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Tuesday, 10 May 2011 08:39 CDT

slaes
i know i know man, tell me about it.

However over the years i basically rewrote them to suite me, and can hardly even tell is phpBB. very customized, and besides only some side stuff i play with. Xrumer is my only achilles heel, and seems it just can be stopped. I dont know if they have their sites set on kunena or ninjaboard but image as they become even more popular, will have no doubt. Nothing can be done about these spamming russian machines, moan, obviously it works as i would image google would have tried doing something about it.

Tuesday, 10 May 2011 15:24 CDT

nicholas
The only thing you can do -since you're into core modification- is to introduce multi-factor authentication. What I mean is have reCAPTCHA during signup and an ad-hoc CAPTCHA (something like "Enter the result of two plus five" works nice) at user login. If you want to go very deeply into core modification, you can compile a list of potential spam words, rate the "spaminess" of the post based on them and when the score is over a threshold (think of what SpamAssasin does) ask the user to fill in a reCAPTCHA before accepting the post. Yes, the false positives will be irritating, but that's the compromise you have to live with.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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