list spam related question

tparker · Post by **tparker** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 2:47 pm

In the thread "[Wine] New to Wine...and already in trouble..." there was
a spam post by kizi that says it was "Sent from the Wine - Users
mailing list archive at Nabble.com".

Can people really send things to our list/forum from other sites/forums?
It also seems odd that the reply directs a person to catch up on the
thread by linking to Nabble instead of the Wine forum. It is possible
that this is very normal and just something I haven't run into before.
If so can someone please educate me as to the benefits?

FrÃ©dÃ©ric Delanoy · Tue Sep 20, 2011 4:45 pm

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 21:42, tparker <[email protected]> wrote:

In the thread "[Wine] New to Wine...and already in trouble..." there was a
spam post by kizi that says it was "Sent from the Wine Â - Users mailing list
archive at Nabble.com".

Can people really send things to our list/forum from other sites/forums? It
also seems odd that the reply directs a person to catch up on the thread by
linking to Nabble instead of the Wine forum. It is possible that this is
very normal and just something I haven't run into before. If so can someone
please educate me as to the benefits?

This is just spam. Generally when you see a couple of URLs here and
there, there's a 99.99% probability this is spam.
Just ignore

Post by **DanKegel** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 6:27 pm

There is (or was) a mailing list gateway, and about 10% of
the users access this group via a mailing list rather than
the web forum interface. This is normal.

We might drop the gateway, though, because it's unsupported in
the new version of phpbb, which we need because it has better
antispam measures.

Post by **dimesio** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 6:35 pm

tparker wrote:In the thread "[Wine] New to Wine...and already in trouble..." there was
a spam post by kizi that says it was "Sent from the Wine - Users
mailing list archive at Nabble.com".

Can people really send things to our list/forum from other sites/forums?
It also seems odd that the reply directs a person to catch up on the
thread by linking to Nabble instead of the Wine forum. It is possible
that this is very normal and just something I haven't run into before.
If so can someone please educate me as to the benefits?

Yes, people can post from Nabble via the mailing list, and have done so in the past. It's very annoying; Nabble mangles threads, and posts end up getting attributed to the wrong people. I don't see why the mailing list itself allows posts from Nabble.

tparker · Post by **tparker** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 7:05 pm

On 09/20/2011 07:27 PM, DanKegel wrote:

There is (or was) a mailing list gateway, and about 10% of
the users access this group via a mailing list rather than
the web forum interface. This is normal.

From the wine email list yes, that is what I use. I was wondering about
the post saying it was sent from our 'list archive at Nabble.com' and if
that were really possible. It was obviously a spam post (many garbage
links) and that made me curious if some connection to Nabble was part of
our spam problem. I know that Nabble does show our forum posts, they
usually turn up much closer to the top of google searches than winehq
and related links do. I do not know if Nabble's archiving of the posts
goes beyond an archive to being actually connected to the wine forum the
way that spam post made it sound.

tparker · Post by **tparker** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 7:07 pm

On 09/20/2011 07:35 PM, dimesio wrote:

Yes, people can post from Nabble via the mailing list, and have done
so in the past. It's very annoying; Nabble mangles threads, and posts
end up getting attributed to the wrong people. I don't see why the
mailing list itself allows posts from Nabble.

Thank you! That is what I was curious about.

Would it be reasonable to block posting via Nabble (and anything
similar) and see if/how that changes the rate of spam posts we get?

Post by **dimesio** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 8:07 pm

tparker wrote:Would it be reasonable to block posting via Nabble (and anything
similar) and see if/how that changes the rate of spam posts we get?

I've always thought posting to the mailing list should be limited to subscribers just as posting to the forum is, simply as a matter of fairness, but I doubt it would make much of a difference in the spam. Most of that is posted directly on the forum. What would help is the ability to force moderation on new posters, but that capability is not present in the version of phpbb used now. That's why the upgrade is needed.

jjmckenzie · Post by **jjmckenzie** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 8:53 pm

On 9/20/11 5:02 PM, tparker wrote:

On 09/20/2011 07:35 PM, dimesio wrote:
Yes, people can post from Nabble via the mailing list, and have done
so in the past. It's very annoying; Nabble mangles threads, and posts
end up getting attributed to the wrong people. I don't see why the
mailing list itself allows posts from Nabble.
Thank you! That is what I was curious about.

Would it be reasonable to block posting via Nabble (and anything
similar) and see if/how that changes the rate of spam posts we get?

Blocking or shutting down the mail gateway would not do much for cutting
down the spam. I just blocked two more sites and banned five more users
that were spammers on the FORUM site.
99% of the spam is coming from 'live' posters on the Forums.

James

SpawnHappyJake · Post by **SpawnHappyJake** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 4:29 am

What if a user's first x posts (3,5,10, whatever) had to be approved before the post can be posted on either the forum or the mailing list?

And maybe after 200 valid posts, a moderator could elect a user to be an "approver", if you guys get short on moderators. An "approver" would have no where near the power of a moderator. An approver only would have the power to approve a post.

A moderator could subtract valid posts from a users count toward not having to be appr

SpawnHappyJake · Post by **SpawnHappyJake** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 4:32 am

...approved if someone accidentally hits the "approve" button. _Wow_ was that ironic! And _no_ that was not intentional.

But you get the idea.

Cheers,
Jake

Martin Gregorie · Post by **Martin Gregorie** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 5:33 am

On Thu, 2011-09-22 at 18:52 -0700, James McKenzie wrote:

Blocking or shutting down the mail gateway would not do much for cutting
down the spam. I just blocked two more sites and banned five more users
that were spammers on the FORUM site.
99% of the spam is coming from 'live' posters on the Forums.

Some actual figures
===================
I have a spam collection of that I use to develop Spamassassin rules.
Right now it contains 612 messages. 354 of those have a
'List-id:.*wine-users.winehq.org' header, i.e. I was sent them by the
Wine users mailing list. Thats 58% of the collection. Here's a breakdown
of where those 354 messages came from:

5 ( 1.4%) contain the 'X-Nabble-from' header, so are from Nabble
15 ( 4.2%) come from other places
334 (94.4%) contain the "From: somename <[email protected]>" header,
so are from the Wine users forum.

Bottom line: I agree with James. Virtually all the spam on the list
comes from the Wine users forum.

Martin

David Hagood · Post by **David Hagood** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 6:18 am

Would it be possible to put something like DSPAM or Spamassasin in-line
on the forum, to evaluate the posts? My local DSPAM catches about 90% of
the spam from the forum with very few false positives. Just quarantining
the messages identified as spam and requiring them to be moderated would
not be a large number of messages and would remove much of the spam.

Also, I see a lot of "probe" posts - posts that are an attempt to see if
posting is possible and to build a post count before the spam run; posts
like "your blog is very informative and I have bookmarked it" or "very
useful information, thanks". Were there a way to flag such users as
potential future spammers we might be able to prevent the spam run from
ever happening.

Post by **dimesio** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 6:18 am

SpawnHappyJake wrote:What if a user's first x posts (3,5,10, whatever) had to be approved before the post can be posted on either the forum or the mailing list?

What part of

that capability is not present in the version of phpbb used now. That's why the upgrade is needed.

do you not understand?

Martin Gregorie · Post by **Martin Gregorie** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 7:04 am

On Fri, 2011-09-23 at 06:18 -0500, dimesio wrote:

SpawnHappyJake wrote:
What if a user's first x posts (3,5,10, whatever) had to be approved before the post can be posted on either the forum or the mailing list?

What part of

that capability is not present in the version of phpbb used now. That's why the upgrade is needed.
do you not understand?

BTW, I had a look at the phbb website yesterday and don't understand why
everybody thinks it can't connect to a mailing list when it appears that
the current version of phpbb has the ability to send posts to an MTA.

This message stream could be directed to an MTA which could run each
message through a spam filter before sending it to mailman, the current
mailing list manager. Even if, for some reason phpbb has to talk to a
dedicated MTA (maybe to use a specialised spam filter) before the
messages are passed directly to mailman or via the current Exim MTA,
using either Exim or Postfix as the intermediate looks to be very
straight forward.

Martin

Post by **dimesio** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 7:47 am

Martin Gregorie wrote:BTW, I had a look at the phbb website yesterday and don't understand why
everybody thinks it can't connect to a mailing list when it appears that
the current version of phpbb has the ability to send posts to an MTA.

So you think it's perfectly fine to let spammers run free on the forum so long as the mailing list users are protected from it? Because your suggestion does absolutely nothing to help stop spam on the forum.

The version of phpbb currently being used does NOT have the capability of forcing moderation on new users, which pretty much everyone realizes is the best way to control spam. The current version of phpbb DOES have that capability, but the mail2forum gateway does not work with it. And that brings us back to the issues discussed in http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=13332

Martin Gregorie · Post by **Martin Gregorie** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 9:46 am

On Fri, 2011-09-23 at 07:47 -0500, dimesio wrote:

Martin Gregorie wrote:
BTW, I had a look at the phbb website yesterday and don't understand why
everybody thinks it can't connect to a mailing list when it appears that
the current version of phpbb has the ability to send posts to an MTA.

So you think it's perfectly fine to let spammers run free on the forum
so long as the mailing list users are protected from it? Because your
suggestion does absolutely nothing to help stop spam on the forum.

Of course not, but one of the stated reasons for shutting down the
mailing list was that there was no way of putting a spam filter between
phpbb 3.x and the mailing list. I was pointing out that, if I had read
the feature list correctly, mail2forum is not needed with phpbb 3.x
because it can now send mail directly to an MTA and outlining a way of
passing that stream through a spam filter.

On closer inspection of phpbb documentation, it appears that I
misunderstood that section of the feature list. However there are at
least two mailing list bridges being planned: there is an upgrade to
mail2forum (now known as m2f), though I don't know how old or active
that might be since it only mentions phpbb 2.x, and there's talk on the
phpbb site of another project to provide a mailing list bridge to v3.x.

The version of phpbb currently being used does NOT have the capability
of forcing moderation on new users, which pretty much everyone
realizes is the best way to control spam.

Understood.

The current version of phpbb DOES have that capability,

Yes, I saw that too.

but the mail2forum gateway does not work with it.

...yet, and there may be another bridge along too.

Martin

Post by **DanKegel** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 1:51 pm

If you know of a good mail/forum gateway that works with current phpbb,
please let us know.

Martin Gregorie · Post by **Martin Gregorie** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 2:27 pm

On Fri, 2011-09-23 at 13:51 -0500, DanKegel wrote:

If you know of a good mail/forum gateway that works with current phpbb,
please let us know.

I'd suggest you keep an eye on mail2forum. A look at its blog says that
they've done a major redesign for v2.0, that it will work with phpbb 3.x
and that the alpha is out now. The main worry is that the last blog
entry is dated 22 Feb 2011.

Martin

SpawnHappyJake · Post by **SpawnHappyJake** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 3:09 pm

What part of
that capability is not present in the version of phpbb used now. That's why the upgrade is needed.
do you not understand?

My bad, Dimesio. I should have remembered that and prefaced my thought with "if you revise the forum website, then you can ...".

So I take it that the barrier to upgrading to a newer phpbb is that the mailing list would not be supported by phpbb. I'm having a hard time believing that it would be completely impossible to have a mailing list if part of the WINE forum web scripting was written in phpbb. Couldn't another part of it be written in something other than the new phpbb? Couldn't it call a script that put everything posted into a mailing list? Or even write your own mailing list handler in the new phpbb, rather than depending on phpbb providing a ready-made mailing list handler?

Well, no matter how wrong I might be, I hope the forum gets better for you guys (and me).

Cheers,
Jake

SpawnHappyJake · Post by **SpawnHappyJake** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 3:14 pm

Never mind. I think a bunch of stuff about a possible mailing list got posted in the meantime of me starting my last post.