Safe Speed Forums

Can any of you web gurus tell me how these things work?

Surely there isn't a real person scouring the web for forums to register on and then posting sh1te on each?

If its done automatically, how does it find the site in the first place, set the account up, acknowledge the following email, find a forum on which to post and then insert a new thread?
And no, I have no intention of trying it for myself

Put very simply bots and scripting.

Bots are computers with trojans on so are under the spammers' control and the scripting takes care of the rest.

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Prepare to be Judged

This site runs phpBB which is one of about 4 or 5 major forum packages out there.

Sure the admins can change the graphics and colours and whatnot but the important bits like the Register link are the same as all the other phpBB installations out there so it's a piece of piss to automate it.

How do they find it, well googling for the phpbb copyright message would be one way, or they can just trawl through the list of domain names and append common paths like /forum/ /forums/ /phpbb/ /vbulletin/ etc. etc. to find it.

They have plenty of resources out there to do this. There's a lot of people out there who run with no antivirus software, or who install every piece of crap that their browser prompts them to install. I'm sure you have a friend or relative with a PC exactly like this. It's more expensive than yours but it runs like a bag of nails but they dont care and dont fix it since it "still works", they just carry on completely oblivious to the havok their PC is unleashing on the internet. Basically the internet equivalent of the 40mph in the middle lane crew.

The only thing they can't automate reliably is the captchas many forums have these days. In most cases the bot just sends the image to a data entry centre in China and the minimum wage employee spends their entire day filling the things in.

I had to change my service because of it. FreeUK, which I've used for ~10 years, has served me well but there's no spam control. The other day I had over 1500 emails of crap on it!

Now I'm on Googlemail and I must say life is much better

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The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of Safe Speed.
You will be branded a threat to society by going over a speed limit where it is safe to do so, and suffer the consequences of your actions in a way criminals do not, more so than someone who is a real threat to our society.

I'm pretty sure SafeSpeed has a captcha, but by whatever means bots seems to get round them quite easily nowadays.

One thing that has been done on another forum I use is to change the standard typed message of "I AGREE" to "I ACCEPT" or something else that is different, which throws a lot of the bots. That would need someone skilled at working in the phpBB engine room. But it does seem to work - that forum has vastly fewer spam registrations than this one.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed