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By adamg on Sat, 01/23/2021 - 11:40pm
Please drop me a line (see the Contact link at the bottom of any page) and let me know and I'll get you set up, so you can lock in your name for comments and get e-mail updates on replies in discussions you're interested in.
I've had to turn off the new-user registration system because of a particularly nasty spam attack tonight:
Spammers have been trying for years to get user account on UHub so they can spew their crap via articles that registered users can post. I review all the account requests and, unfortunately, the spammers have gotten better at coming up with realistic sounding accounts - they've graduated from nonsense names at stupidly named servers that were easy to just mark for deletion to using names that are way more realistic (today, for example, I got a bunch of requests for accounts that seemed to be from people I actually know online, which at first seemed cool, but then I thought, wait, why are all these people registering for accounts all at once, so I asked one and she hadn't applied for an account, a spammer was going through Boston Twitter accounts and picking out names and Twitter bios, then using an e-mail account at mail.com to try to get accounts approved).
So while I catch most of the spammer attempts, some have still slipped through. Like tonight, a stealth account (I'd approved it months ago) fired up an automated posting system that not only filled UHub and its e-mail feeds (my apologies to anybody subscribed to particular topics on UHub or who pick up the RSS feeds!) but crashed the site, which meant I had to take the site down, then go into the database to unactivate the account and the dozens of posts it had created so it wouldn't happen all over again (and, of course, I screwed up one of the MySQL commands and so basically unpublished tens of thousands of legitimate posts; fortunately, I had followed the Prime Directive of database mucking: Always make a backup before you try anything really big).
In addition to this, all this crap then showed up on Google News, which potentially jeopardizes my ability to have articles show up there, which is Not a Good Thing.
So, bottom line, if you've gotten this far, is no more self-registration for new accounts, at least until I figure out a better solution. But as I said up top, drop me a line. Also, if you'd been approved for an account over the past couple of months but had never logged in, please drop me a line as well - I just deleted all accounts that had never been used.
Free tagging:
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Comments
Thanks for all the hard work!
That’s a great reminder that running a site like this is a real PITA and not JUST from the legit users. :)
I don’t comment much but I’ve dealt with enough of that kind of crap to know what a hassle it is. Thanks Adam!
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Thanks Adam
I really appreciate the perspective and community here, so thank you for working so hard to make it it continue!
Drupal module
Is UHub still a Drupal site (looks like it)? If it is, I've had good luck with Jeff Geerling's Honeypot module. It's also less of an accessibility nightmare compared to captchas these days (I'm a human, or so I'm told, and had to try the comment captcha twice).
Thanks
I have it installed, and it works well for blocking comment spam by bots. The issue here is somebody manually signing up for an account, me approving them by mistake, then them going hog wild.
Last night was somebody with an account who then ran an auto-poster, which I haven't seen before. I think there's another module that lets you limit how many posts somebody can put up in a set amount of time, I should look at that as well.
Ooh, I take that back
Honeypot's more robust than I thought - looks like I can use it to limit the number of posts created in a given amount of time even by somebody with an account. Thanks for the nudge to take a look.
I feel ya
I started a blog using WP. I know you dont use WP (although some of the standard themes, I errily feel like I'm on Uhub)
Cuz I'm just me and like everything word pre$$.. $$$$ for any decent spam protection. I got spammed one afternoon, and got 4000 new account messages at once.
I hadnt posted in a while and just left a stickie much like yours and said email me for an account.
So I feel ya.
I manage an email list with a
I manage an email list with a manual sign-up form on a website for a small organization. In my half decade of managing this, we never used to get many obvious spam signup requests but over the past year I have deleted too many to count. They often have real sounding names, though they'll do something stupid like enter the name time so it shows up as "John Smith John Smith." The form asks them for their affiliated organization and they seem to always enter a dictionary word rather than the name of a company or school that they should be entering.
So, i got targeted by a very
So, i got targeted by a very interesting attack several years ago that I suspect is exacly what is filling your spam logs.
There are tools out there to obliterate an email account with "legit" emails. Even if you follow the "Email to be sure thye want the email" when you sign people up for 1000s of those, they still get 1000s of confirmation emails.
I got 50000 in about 12 hours. It tapered off after that but i still get the strangest junk mail. deals on Guns in rural California, Ukrainian Brides in French, Sales for servers in Turkish, Car Parts in Greek.
Good Work, Adam
Looks like it is time to hit the TIP JAR again.
Thanks for making it look easy
Keeping it interesting without letting things devolve into an escalating insult contest is not easy.
Thanks for allowing strongly worded disagreement (fun to watch) while making sure it doesn't get out of hand. The high ratio of actual debate to spew in the comments is higher here than on any of the other websites that I like to read.
Thank you
Been a UHub member for almost six years now. Thank you Adam for the great work you do on the site.
When I see articles on other sites (notably the Globe), actually quoting UHub in an article, you're doing something right. :)
Thanks for the hard work
New transplant and viewer here who really appreciates the great content. Making my presence known now in case I ever want an account down the road. ;)
Another MySQL DB tip
START TRANSACTION;
DROP DATABASE UHUB;
ROLLBACK/COMMIT;
Always make your big changes in a transaction. You can see the count of changes your updates/deletes make and you can check the data in its new state before using commit or rollback depending on if you want to keep the transaction or kill it.
Ah!
OK, I admit it, my mistake was really stupid, and not even a MySQL mistake, really: I wanted to change a field on all entries in one table with an ID number higher than 111,000 or some such (basically a flag to change the articles from "published" to "unpublished"). It's a really simple MySQL thing, only instead of >111000, I typed >11000 ... and then hit Go, and off it went!
Illegitimi non carborundum
Thanks for all your hard work maintaining this valuable resource, Adam.
Ouch!
Sorry to hear that you've gone through such hardships, and have had to close universal hub.com to new self-registration, as a result, Adam.
I haven't come on here as much, but I still come here to comment, every now and then.