[neilkaz]

What does this have to do about bridge ?

Here at this forum if you scroll down the bottom of the lists of forums you'll finding the off topic forum known as the Water Cooler which is where I suspect the mods will move this thread, if they don't delete it entirely.

.. neilkaz ..

[the saint]

This is spam. There is the exact same post on another forum I am a member of.

[Rain]

I think its an okay post, not spam/ad/illegal stuff. Pelethan posted a joke on his first post.

I don't watch movies or TV or read or talk to people anymore. I play WOW. =D

[inquiry]

I moved this post to here from the bridge forum, and I have concerns about his kennedy/lincoln post and this movie post. Only because as first post to a bridge site they were not bridge related. The day he joined he posted the kennedy thing. There is no player on the bbo with the nickname Pelethan, and he there is one more concern (i will message you about it rain). I think there is way less than zero chance this is some bridge player posting fun stuff for us here. This is a probably a prelude to some spam no doubt about it in my mind. Or might be testing out bots for posting in forums like this, and plans to register with other names and spam all the sites once he works out the bugs.

Now, if Pelethan is real. He will be reading this forum, especially his post and he will point this out to us. If he is not, if instead this is some strategy to build to a trusted level then to post spam that will be not be deleted, he will be sorely disappointed. I have flagged this username and will be messaged any time he post until we figure this out.

[Rain]

nice sleuth work Ben.

So time to ban this guy and IP address (not that that would help)

I think i posted before that spammers/scammers should all be executed. By divine justice if nothing else.

[hrothgar]

Rain, on Nov 21 2006, 12:32 AM, said:

nice sleuth work Ben.

So time to ban this guy and IP address (not that that would help)

I think i posted before that spammers/scammers should all be executed. By divine justice if nothing else.

I'm kinda cruious what the SPAM might be...

Maybe this is some kind of astroturf for the new movie "Bobby"

[inquiry]

hrothgar, on Nov 20 2006, 04:38 PM, said:

Rain, on Nov 21 2006, 12:32 AM, said:

nice sleuth work Ben.

So time to ban this guy and IP address (not that that would help)

I think i posted before that spammers/scammers should all be executed. By divine justice if nothing else.

I'm kinda cruious what the SPAM might be...

Maybe this is some kind of astroturf for the new movie "Bobby"

There is no spam here (well, other thna off topic material). However, this username registered for dozens of forums on nov 14th and 15th for the first time, and posted the kennedy thing and the movie thing.

If you wnat to see how active Pelethan has been google that name and look at all the forums he joined on nov 14 and 15 (inlucding ours). Best I can tell he joined more than 100 forums those two days. He evne joined a german one, a french one and an chinese one and posted this stuff in english to them. You will see quickly some, but not all, of the evidence that suggest this is a bot posting stuff to forums. The question of course, is why?

[Trumpace]

inquiry, on Nov 20 2006, 04:46 PM, said:

You will see quickly some, but not all, of the evidence that suggest this is a bot posting stuff to forums. The question of course, is why?

If the bot posts a link, which when clicked exploits some of the bugs in I.E/Firefox, chances are, of the 100s of forums these get posted to, quite a few people will click on those links, especially after initially seeing seemingly harmless posts like this.

Clever example of social engineering.

[inquiry]

Trumpace's answer seems reasonable. I have banned this username. I think we might want to include a new class of users, something like senior member who has posted something on bridge. Only a senior member can then post a non-bridge topic in water cooler (or elsewhere). And we routinely just delete any watercooler type post from someone who has never posted something related to bridge.

It is a thought anyway.

[Trumpace]

One question that bothers me is, how did pelethan actually manage to create an account? If it is a bot (as seems possible from the multiple forum posts), it must be a really clever bot which bypassed the security mechanism we have in place (an image which shows a alphanumeric word which you have to type in), or, there must be some bug in the forum software which pelethan used to get in.

Maybe we need a better security mechanism in place (or is that a forum software thing that cannot be changed?) or perhaps need an upgrade to software to fix bugs?

[hrothgar]

Trumpace, on Nov 21 2006, 02:02 AM, said:

One question that bothers me is, how did pelethan actually manage to create an account? If it is a bot (as seems possible from the multiple forum posts), it must be a really clever bot which bypassed the security mechanism we have in place (an image which shows a alphanumeric word which you have to type in), or, there must be some bug in the forum software which pelethan used to get in.

Maybe we need a better security mechanism in place (or is that a forum software thing that cannot be changed?) or perhaps need an upgrade to software to fix bugs?

Its actually quite easy to bypass most pattern recognition type security systems.
Its been outsourced to India and China.

There are plenty of computer shops in the third world where users are payed tiny amounts of money to solve these types of problems.

[the saint]

As I said before and I will say it again - exactly the same poster poseted exactly the same post on another completely unrelated forum to this one = SPAMBOT.