is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - General
 

the user named "validhack"
I think this site is very old, should improve the security.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

are spambot

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

Please just use the Report Post (https://forums.alliedmods.net/images/buttons/report.svg) button below the user's profile.

Both when you see stuff like this, but also if there are other posts that you feel may be in violation with the AlliedModders Rules.

Correct.

The problem, regardless the age of the site, is that these spam bots are getting more and more "sophisticated":

I once saw something that looked like a spam bot, so therefore I triggered an infraction causing a ban, with a reason like "Spam bot? - Appeal via Contact Us, if you're real.".

I was surprised to see that potential spam bot return and spam again, but it appeared that it had been appealing about the ban, and due to the appeal, it was apparently considered real by someone else.

Although you can get a long way, with a lot of effort, the result you eventually notice, isn't going to be the same forever.

Changing to another kind of forum isn't going to help, or magically fix the problem either.

Spam bots are learning your layers of defence, which means to be pro-active, it requires you to be constantly on guard, and be adapting to new things.

That rarely works that well, together with things driven by volunteers.

There is simply no permanent fix to the problem, regardless what you do (or don't do).

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

a simple captcha in the login or in the comment boxes would be enough, I bet these bots are so noob that they couldn't overcome the challenge.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

I posted about this at the beginning of the year.

https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=341302

Most of the spam accounts are hijacked accounts with legit post history etc. This forum needs to reset everyone's password if they want to stop this.

Of course a year past almost and nothing has been done.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

fixed :idea:

Quick Reply

Message: Hello friends, I bring you an incredible special offer, you cannot miss it...

Rant:

3x-8=x?

• 1
• 4
• 7

Post Quick Reply | Go Advanced

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

That would block more real users that suck at math and some spambots would still bypass it :lol:

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

No, unfortunately not.

While some bots may be "so noob", as you explain, many of them aren't.

The issue you posted about, was regarding existing - but hijacked accounts.

This thread is about new spam bot registrations.

Account 355909 (literally named "validhack") was created on 2023-12-18, and posted it's junk on on 2023-12-18 06:54 (CET, +0100).

That one is actually false.

It does happen like that, but it definitely isn't the most of it that has an existing legit post history and/or old account creditability, in the way as you say.

I don't really agree with the "everyone's" part though, however, something like that may also become useful, in regards to stopping the problem with the existing - but hijacked accounts.

Having a mandatory password reset, such as if you've been gone from the forums for e.g. 3 months, or 12 months, before you can access the forums again, could be a way of reducing the impact of that specific issue.

But again, a such thing won't prevent the kind of junk that this specific thread is targetting.

What exactly do you expect to be done, explained down to the smallest detail?

A such kind of captcha, or any other kind of captcha, even if you create your own customized one, it will proving it's effect for a very limited amount of time.

As I said above:

That being said, I will be more than happy to admit that I also believe more things could be tried, in order to act more pro-actively to the issues.

But two questions comes up again and again, in regards to that:

1. How many false positives do we want?
2. What is most important?
   a) Effective spam bot defence
   b) That we are not limiting the ability for regular users to use the forums.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

Very simple solution:

In order to sign-up at AlliedModders.net, please send $3 to the following address..."

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

:mrgreen:

That would stop them all at once.
But to be fair to users out of not so rich countries, it should be any currency and a low number.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

If you thought this was funny, imagine this: https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?p=2590227

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

Sounds like we're having some of the same thoughts? :D

Well, once in the past, on Discord, someone was bringing up something, that sounded like complaints that the administrators/moderators were not doing enough in order to combat the spam on the forums, although I didn't comment it at that time, I was thinking about a comment like:

I'm however under the impression that we would get a lot of hate with that...

I don't think we would be stopping all of them at once, alone with a $3 fee though.

I don't think a low number would give the solution to the problem though.

In the end, we're always getting back to:

A registration fee could solve 2.a, but it will add complications in regards to 2.b, especially if we're talking about the not so rich countries, as mentioned above.

An alternative to the registration fee could be the KYC kind of way, like banks / financial institutions, where we would require identity documents (e.g. passport, driver license, ...) in order to activate the account.

But such kind of KYC would likely be scaring people away, or otherwise give complications just like a registration fee would.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

Of course I exaggerated a little, something as basic as addition and subtraction.

It will take some time to adjust, it can serve as a temporary "brake", which is still better than nothing.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

https://i.ibb.co/n6CRQJ6/2024-02-28-120212.jpg

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

Will never happen. This is a free open source community as it should.
The problem is not the spambots, the problem is that we need more active staff. Also a tool to delete or at least move to a staff-only sub-forum would also be nice to make the forum more clean.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

:nono::nono::nono:

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

I've also manage a forum and adding captcha to <1 month old or <50 posts accounts reduced spam drastically.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

And your forum has a country block.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

the idea of ​​limiting participation in the forum without first making a payment, I don't think it would be a good option, you know why, just look at the donations received and draw your conclusions, I still maintain the hypothesis of implementing an innovative captcha. We are not programmers? get creative.

due to ddos ​​attacks

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

Maybe at least 3 days need to passed since account creation to do any comment or posts ( idk if it exists )






if(g_iUserCooldown[id] < get_gametime() + 259200) xD

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

The staff has been busy, I don’t think there will be any anti-spam changes soon.
The proper solution would be Bugsy selecting more one or two moderators.
On AMXX, approval system could also be removed and become like sourcemod. If it’s bad, unapproved. Else let it be.
I mean, what’s the point of having approved plugins if there are no approvals for years?
Hamlet’s job would become much easier to handle by himself and forum would get cleaner.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

-> The forum does not support No-Steam.

-> The forum does not charge a $3 fee, in order to be more inclusive.
-> Valve games costs more than $3.
-> A visitor who is not able to pay a $3 fee is not able to buy Valve games.

-> The forum does support No-Steam.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

What non-steam has to do with this? This is an open source community, i don’t know why you are insisting on it.
“ The term open source refers to any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit. Unlike proprietary software, open source software is computer software that is developed as a public, open collaboration and made freely available to the public.”

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

It's like you are really bad with logics.

And what's the point of this comment: "The term open source..."


"We never knew what open source is in our life. A lot of thanks for this very useful information!"

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

My logics are bad? You want the community to stop being open source just because people pay for games. Guess what, games were always paid. If the staff wanted to charge people to create accounts they would have already made it on the past, back when the community was super active. Just stop your non-sense talk, your suggestion goes against everything this community stands for.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

As We've said before, it's better for you to say nothing.

Do you remember how many bullshit you added in this thread https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=105030 when our first post on it already clearly explained the reason the stuff not worked?

You came to that thread just like you know everything, and in the end it was just like We were teaching a novice.

For someone who created an account in this forum in 2012 and denotes no much knowledge about runtime, does not cache results from natives and still ignoring even in the most called forwards, the slowness of your understanding is considerable high.

"AlliedModders is an open-source development community. We are focused on server-side modifications to any and all games on the Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2 platforms"

So what else you want to expect from a visitor in this forum? What kind of subject?

Our post before yours already points out everything.

The forum has open source stuff. Files are freely accessible and downloadable, no need to sign-up or even a password to get access.

Which obviously does not mean posting stuff on the forum has to follow the same principia.

What the heck are you talking about?

People will still access the stuff for free.
Who said the forum will sell plugin scripts?

It's a suggestion for security enhancement and for a better experience for the forum users who are here with the desire to see only stuff related to the content they love and not spending their time reading, reporting and deleting unrelated stuff.

You do not need to comment anything else when something is already enough.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

I don’t know why your first account got banned but i am pretty sure it was reasonable. Again, what does that thread has to do with this topic? You are always arguing and derailing off-topic trying to make a point at all cost. This community will never charge users, i’ve been here for long enough to know it. That isn’t an option and you would know if you tried to read the forum rules and objectives.

There are several people here with 0 programming background that manage to learn some cool stuff. If you don’t like it this way feel free to respect whoever banned your first account and don’t come back to this forum. But don’t come here demanding the forum to change it’s community essence just because you don’t like to report spambots.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

You should be ashamed to return to this topic.

Anyone who read our previous post has already seen that you confuse people and continue to confuse them by saying that charging a fee to open a account in the forum means blocking access to files and pages.

Anyone can see the amount of time you make us waste due to your own problems.

And about our account, you hate our presence in the forum.

But don't worry, We will be here forever.

Re: is this site get hacked? an invalid thread and user appears in Sourcemod - Genera
 

This is the drastically reduced amount of spam - approximately 90% of spam post attempts are blocked by the existing automated measures.