How do spammers find Dolphin anyway?

It's not a big deal for me at least right now because I don't use Dolphin for much more than a way to learn PHP and maybe some css in my spare time.  Something that is likely a newbie question,....

How do spammers locate a Dolphin site in the first place?  For search robots, I put in the do not follow but not sure how the bots spammers use track down a site.  To be clear, I know I can block IPs, etc to lock down a site.  I'm interested in HOW they do it.

This sounds a little paranoid/suspect but can Boonex modders or even Boonex themselves collect the url and then pass it on to potential spammers?Or is it just some bot that is looking for specific files somewhere?   

Just curious.

FYI, I've played with 6.x for a long while and just last week loaded 7.09. Looks cool. Great job everyone contributing to it's design!

Hi,

First of all there are millions of bots, you blocking one or a few of them can not be considered a block at all.

Secondly what you do is to politely ask the bot owner not to follow your link, he can choose to ignore that.

So, you will not be able to get rid of bots, unless your site is not accessible at all.

How they do find you, well, as you guessed they search, not manually perhaps but through bots or other means.

There are other ways to fend off spammers though, and there are plenty of advice here in the forum or just google it.

Just a few:

Use capchas

Use a non standard way of registering/joining

Don't allow new users to do certain things

Only allow guests/anonymous users to do certain things

Best,

Eric

Mostly they use the Google "Inurl" search method and put something like "/m/blog" in or whatever they know is specific to Dolphin sites.

Thanks Eric but still not sure how they find such an obscure url that is not promoted anywhere with 7 just loaded days ago.  Magic?  ha.

My install is a native Dolphin script with their captcha already invoked by default so they are getting around it somehow.  I did get a couple of mods but I'm certain from reputable vendors so I tend not to suspect them so much or even Boonex really. 

I got my first unsolicited entry 2 days ago with an email notification of a new user who put in his profile, "I really like this site" lol.

Today, I got a second email notification of a new user and when I went to the Dolphin site, there was info in the homepage spy block about a new group.  Clicking on that link provides:

... lysine roznymi cieczami i prowadzacy poprzez wywarla duzy wezel drogi. I przerzucenie kilku geniuszy techniki terapii aromatami i obrazami. Nie nauczycie tej wysokosci wiezozrostu zwykle skosne promienie wpadaly przez kola olbrzymich wozow przecinaly padajacy. Delikatniejszych pomocnikow jest we wszystkich swoich i kompanow wyczynach spirit i podporucznik christopher wren ogromnie waznymi sprawami zwiazanymi ze strony angielskiej opinii moich pokladach przez co posiadaja. Osunely sie nizej notowanymi czarnymi figurami lub jakim byl czyn wprowadzalem i pozwolily slupskowi i uzyskano surowiec do budowy kulturowej ...

I took an excerpt out of the entire post including the promotional links embedded (don't want to spread their spam). 

I also know it is fake but it shows the country as Afganistan, the city as Santa Rosa and the zip as 123456. Sharing just in case someone else has a replica by rare chance.

Back to my question though, and maybe it's purely a bot question, how do they find a Dolphin site?  Given there are hundreds of thousands of active bots, how do they do it?  Get a list of IPs and bump against each one?  If so, what flags it as a site?

On a second note, how are they injecting content around the join screen?  How do I tighten that up? 

It's really too huge a topic to answer thoroughly here, running an open community properly really requires a system administrator, or at least someone knowledgeable about these things.

Or you can study hard for a month or two :)

They find you, or most likely their bots, by searching for something dolphin specific, as mscott wrote. Another simple example would be Google Alerts.

Anyway, it really does not matter how they will find you, they will whatever you do. You just have to learn how to deal with them. An just understand that automatic scripts/bots will most likely be your biggest problem, not individual guys in Afghanistan :)

Block countries per IP-range on your server, or through htaccess, is another thing you would want to do, for example for Afganistan.

Regarding capchas, there are plenty of different capchas, some easily circumvented by bots some harder, googles capcha is pretty good, if you consider changing the default one, I'm not sure how good that one is, I have a closed community myself.

But as i wrote above, try investigating those tips i gave you. You should change the login/registration procedure to be non-standard. You can find a lot of info here in the forum about it.

Also

Several effective methods can be found here:

http://www.boonex.com/forums/?action=goto&search=1#topic/spam-spam-spam-spam-IDEA-.htm

About how new your site is, as soon as it's indexed by Google (which only takes a day or two) they can find you using inurl.

Many Dolphin site have one thing in common, the foot text. 

Spammers are using quotes when they search for the footer text

"About Us Privacy Terms FAQ Invite A Friend Contact Us Bookmark"

I have found the Chinese are using this entire footer text and are searching google for  "About Us Privacy Terms FAQ Invite A Friend Contact Us Bookmark" and all boonex sites come up in the results. I was site number 303 on the last google search results. Once they get all the site info the next day all the Nike Spam, Knockoff Handbag spam ect starts rolling in.

The way to stop them from finding you using this search is to change the wording in the footer text so it is not the same as all the other boonex sites

I think we have been over this a hundred times now. If you have an open registration and your site is indexed (which it is) then you have to learn to live, and to deal, with the consequences.

I think there are millions of tips up here and on other places in this forum. Adapting your site beyond recognition for search engines and bots is the toughest one.

How do you know they are searching for those exact words? Why not "Feedback section - questions, comments, regards" or any other word combination on another page. Or how about folders and file names?

Although I'm all in favor for doing all you can to personalize your Dolphin installation, you have a lot more work to do than to remove the footer if you want to avoid spammers, scammers or random idiots.

Best,

Eric

2 page join form with capture on second page works great for the bot sign ups ..

happy thoughts

I know the the Chinese are using "" around the footer text words to find Dolphin sites because I have witnessed the search terms on Statcounter and say they were from China. Once I see that search term in my stats within 48 hours I have a bunch of Chinese placing ads on my site and they all arrive directly using my site url. It's like they send out a scout bot to find and save the domain names of all sites that contain the footer text "About Us Privacy Terms FAQ Invite A Friend Contact Us Bookmark" - The best thing you can do is change the order in which they display and also change some wording to make the words unique.  This will not stop all spammers on your site but it will make your site harder to find using the footer text search which is what all dolphin sites have in common.

I most recently just blocked out China, Russia, Malaysia, Africa altogether in my htaccess file using country block lists I found online for free. I have only have a few try to get in using a local server but I trace them back to another country.The arrive from blocked countries and when they can't get in they hop on a hijacked .edu server and try to register that way but I catch them every time. Using statcounter.com tracking on my site is the best at keeping scammers out.

I trace every new members steps in statcounter and if I can't trace their steps like I should be able to I will not let them in my community. My community is 100% free with over 1600 members and I have only had one spam report from a member since the site was launched in 2010.