Omnimaga
Omnimaga => News => Topic started by: DJ Omnimaga on January 13, 2010, 03:53:35 pm
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As we have been recently more active scouting the TI community for programming-oriented news, we also have checked how active other forums were. It came to our conclusion that Omnimaga has become the most active TI forum avaliable on the Internet, followed by TI-BANK then further behind, United-TI.
This was of course, until we discovered something strange happening with RevSoft.
In the past year, due to certain events and due to general projects inactivity, overall forum activity seemed to have dropped and despite staff effort, it would still not rise signifiantly. Could it have taken a new Zelda update?
However, despite RevSoft inactivity, it seemed their server still experienced huge loads of traffic and slow downs. After further searches, it came to our attention that pretty much the entire interest towards the RevSoft community as we know it has shifted toward another RevSoft forum, which has reached 30000 posts this morning, 10000 more than the RevSoft (http://www.revsoft.org/phpBB2) forum we all knew. You can view it at the following link, but warning! Some content may not be suitable for minors!
http://jim.revsoft.org/forum/
In case for any reason, traffic, which still seems to increase as we write this, would cause the board to be unreachable, we did a screen capture of it so you see the statistics:
(http://www.omnimaga.org/images/screenshots/revsoft3.jpg)
When other TI community people saw this, they couldn't believe their eyes.
-"Wow excellent work jim!" ~Buckeye on #seekanddestroy, EFnet
As we investigated, discoveries became more and more interesting.
-"This contains interesting rare Zelda screens and z80 assembly code." ~Galandros
-"i finally found a TI forum that is more active than Omnimaga" ~DJ Omnimaga
It seems that the key factoring news has definitively helped the TI community get more members who were formely not interested in calculators before. We still haven't figured out why users have prefered this "alternate dimension" RevSoft, though. Could someone have scared everyone away on the main forum? Could there have been a renewal of interest toward projects such as iGo, ColdFusion and SSP2? Has updates shifted there? Could it be the super rare things that can be found over http://jim.revsoft.org/ ? Maybe we will know, one day.
All we know now, though, is that everyone who thought that Omnimaga was now the most active TI calculator forum in monthly posting has been proven wrong. This graph speaks for itself:
(http://www.omnimaga.org/images/screenshots/revsoft2.jpg)
Source: http://jim.revsoft.org/forum/index.php?action=stats
In October, this forum has reached a peak of 6502 posts in one month, which is 8 times higher than what Omnimaga got at the same time. Unfortunately, it seems that interest is slowly waning, as the post rate is dropping by over 1000 every month, but it is still more than twice higher than ours and it seems they are getting more and more members. Every day, this RevSoft forum gets an average of 35 new members. We do not even get this in one entire month!
Unfortunately, it seems that many of the posts have become less and less on-topic in the past year, but maybe this will be improved in the future with advancing technology and discoveries. Could the future of the TI community lies under this newly discovered community?
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We should get 'fake news' like ticalc, although this isn't really fake, just cynic... :'( :'(
It is funny how they didn't rm -rf the whole thing though :P (EDIT: after backing up the rare zelda screens, of course :P )
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The brown colour indicates fake news, right?
Funny quotes. I think Buckeye's one was the best of all, followed by close of DJ's.
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Ha ha...jim still has that up huh. What can I say...have fun reading all the bots
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The thing, though, is that I never thought I would see THAT MANY bots active on a forum before. That must be a record for sure!
We should get 'fake news' like ticalc, although this isn't really fake, just cynic... :'( :'(
Actually we had them for 5 years. We just didn't post any since late 2008. Also Ticalc did some sarcastic ones too before, such as when calc.org redirected to a water gun website.
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I had seen that a long time ago and I thought jim had removed it. But I bet that is why I get emails about some error from our hosting. I dont have access to the hosting anymore so I cant delete it. I guess Jim keeps it up so the bots can have a place to talk amongst themselves.
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Well, until I found this, I was certain kevinJB was still in charge of the hosting. However, noticing Fable-2.com closed, I guess it's no longer the case. I guess it could be a good idea to remove it if you ever get slow downs due to it, though. If you still use the same host KevinJB used, I remember it was not very reliable (lots of times Revsoft was down when I tried to access it) so maybe too much traffic coulc cause problems.
That said, maybe not, considering how much traffic you got when Zelda made it to a game blog and the topic got half a million views or something.
And now I remember something: I think there was one instance where I seen more bots than this before, but it only lasted one day. It was on OCRemix forums, on December 26th 2005. They had about 2000 spambots spamming porn on the forums in one day.
About the forum, I think Jim was planning to move to SMF and create a custom skin but finally no more news about it. Only the main page got changed
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Deathsting requested on RS forums to close the subdomain...
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It looks like some of the spam may be overflowing to the main board.
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I wouldn't be surprised if what he said on the real RS forums might have been happening for much longer than he thinks, because we had it happen on the old Omnimaga forums until we setup members so they cannot send PMs/Emails until they reach 5 posts. I know myself that when TIMGUL still ran on InvisionBoard 1.3, e-mail/contact info was public to guests and I got a lot of spam via e-mail.
As for now, I often get TIMGUL spam notifying me of "undelivered message returned to sender" because an admin uses a fake e-mail address so whenever a new member joins or someone sends him a PM, since TIMGUL boards sends notifications from [email protected], I get a notice saying an email failed to send.
The trick, though, is to simply add filters to your inbox so the spam lands in the spam folder.
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:P
I guess the RevSoft bot filter isn't very effective... lol
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The SMF board had none enabled :P
The same thing would have happened to Omnimaga, if not worse, if we kept CAPTCHA disabled and didn't added a second spam filter system in October.
With these two protections turned on, now we only get like one bot every few day.
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WikiTI also had its spam... There were 1 to 3 per day during some months and were manually erased.
But many spam is still there to clean.
No bot has signed ever since the CAPTCHA was introduced.
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I also remember viruses being embeeded in the page for a while. On UTI people warned to not browse the Wiki for a while until Mediawiki was updated
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The bot filter that we have on our current forums is pretty effective. We rarely get spam posts/topics and members are removed within the day if they are deemed a bot. It seems I am still in admin there, maybe I'll try to a wipe and then update the smf with some bot preventions since I dont think I can get rid of it entirely.
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If I remember correctly, most bots are now manually registered on forums it seems. No matter how strong your anti spam filter is, they will still manually get through. once they signed up on enough website, then they spam automatically.
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Well I went ahead and stopped new members from registering as well as any old members from posting or replying. It seemed Deathsting was getting pms from the bots. I also made it so they cant send pms to anybody either. So that will have to do until it can be deleted. I cleaned it out a bit and it dropped the number of topics by about 27000 and the members by at least 200. I had 40 pages of members waiting for a confirmation from the forum.
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Good idea I guess. On this new SMF version, when deleting members I can choose to delete their posts all at once too, so it speeds up things, but that test board had so many bots o.o
Personally the reason I decided to do a fake news is really because of the extreme amount of spambots. That must be a record for sure. Plus it was funny that spambots could manage to make a TI board 3 times more active than the most active TI forums
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Ha it's all good, that was a crazy amount of bots. Once it started affecting deathsting(bots where sending him pms) and it was affecting his email. I had to do something about it. So I cleared the connection to the server so the forum is visually gone from the web and no connections to the database should be able to occur. Thanks for the post though, because I am pretty sure this was causing an error with our hosting that I have been trying to track down for a while.
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Wow really? o.o
Could it be due to us announcing it? Checking the Revsoft thread, it seems to have started happening right when we posted this fake news :O
That said it was not our intention to trigger pm spam, tho, but on the old Omnimaga forums it happened before (bots spamming ppl via PM, usually nigerian scams) and on UTI it recently did too.
Because seriously, if bringning up this alt forum on Omnimaga triggered this much PM spam on it, that means there must be A LOT of spambots regularing browsing Omnimaga too. :O
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Not sure if you guys triggered it, but its taken care of now. But you might have them lurking watching you guys.
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Yeah, I really think that the bots just followed the forum link through our front page. There are so many bots online, I wouldn't be surprised if this was why United-TI, TI-BANK, Omnimaga and Cemetech had so many guests online at once everytime.
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Either that or we just have a ton of lurkers. XD I really wonder about that myself sometimes. Hey Lurkers! If you're out there, sign up and join the discussion! >:D
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Either that or we just have a ton of lurkers. XD I really wonder about that myself sometimes. Hey Lurkers! If you're out there, sign up and join the discussion! >:D
:) I was one of those for two or three months before I joined a calc site. I took me that long to convince myself. ;D
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we could indeed have a lot of lurkers, because when I check the online list there are often people checking the TI-Nspire and GB emu threads
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Ah, I remember that feature on the old board where you could check the activity of who was viewing the board. Didn't realize you could check it on this new one too.
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Yeah it is possible to enable this on IPB, PHPBB and SMF. I know some forums like UnsyntaxSoft have it disabled, though
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Well I was cleaning out the email account that was associated with that old board and I found a rather interesting email:
This email address was created solely to register automatically at thousands of
forums for the purposes of spamming forums like yours. Remove my account and any
other account registered with my email address!
You should also consider making the password requirements for your forum much
more stringent.
Sincerely,
A Random Digilante Who Is Sick Of Forum Spammers From Russia
To the guy from Russia...your work doesnt go unnoticed. What a great idea.
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Lol seems like a troll or hacker. He might have found about the lack of spam protection (such as the ability of registering with the same e-mail address twice) and might be who spammed the board x.x
I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same person (or group of person) that spam other forums online (from a spamlist)
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Adds an "ethical" touch rofl. (Kinda funny how he first dishes out the damage, and then says the security sucks)
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What I don't understand though is how he claims he did the spam then says he's tired of russian spammers. Kind of a double-standard here :P
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My guess is he created a bot that goes around trying to create accounts on forums and if they succeed the bot sends an email to the owner of the forum. He isnt possible for all the spammers...I think this one user was his way of letting the owners know that their forum isnt secure. Its a noble effort for sure. He wasnt responsible for the 30000 posts and 5000+ users.
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Yeah maybe that too. Sometimes, hackers will be nice enough to tell you what they did, how they did it and why they could do it, then tell you to fix your site as soon as possible in case it happens again. These hackers are malicious too and usually you have to report them too, since they are not allowed to abuse security of websites, but at least they're a bit better than the ones who just wreck the site and go away x.x
EVen worse are those who setup code on your site through exploits and upload bad files that either infects people or spam people from your own email address then get your hosting account suspended or even banned. This happened to TIMGUL in January 2008 (quite ironically, this happened not long after Omni shut down and not long before the anon raid on Omni temp board)
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I think that was a nice hacker, but apparently there wasn't enough "security" in the first place. Is it possible to delete all these posts and users, or is it too much?
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Nothing is too much! ;D
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Ya I dont think there was anything for security measures on that site...it was created way back when jim joined and we were trying to work out some layout for it so we didnt have the measures that our current board does. I have no problem with a hacker that does it for good I just thought it was interesting.
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You may want to turn offline the other boards in that folder too maybe. I think I found one with a pink Revsoft skin for april fools 2007 and another one that was just a copy of the actual Revsoft forum but from 2006
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Necro!
Hehe, cynicism.
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Please do not necropost topics for no reason. This is spam.
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Sorry. Fixed?
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Still bad. Anyway, that one bot invasion was insane, although not even close to be as bad as OCRemix forums on Boxing Day 2005.
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My bad, I didn't know. :-X/me slapsself