I'm also facing this issue on my Laconica instance at www.tweetlah.sg.

Checking the awstats log, I can see that these spammers are searching for
the keyphrase "Laconica <http://laconi.ca/> microblogging software" which is
in the footer of each installation, in order to find sites to spam.

One way I can think of to prevent such spammers from finding my Laconica
site is to encrypt this keyphrase (as done for email addresses, etc).

I used the online form at http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html to
encode this keyphrase in 'character entities':
&#108;&#097;&#099;&#111;&#110;&#105;&#099;&#097;&#032;&#109;&#105;&#099;&#114;&#111;&#098;&#108;&#111;&#103;&#103;&#105;&#110;&#103;&#032;&#115;&#111;&#102;&#116;&#119;&#097;&#114;&#101;

I understand this is not totally foolproof but its something at least, until
a more foolproof and effective solution is found for us, especially
non-techies like me :)

Just one question: Will encrpyting it this way violate any of the terms of
usage?

Regards

Sunny

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 5:45 AM, Evan Prodromou <[email protected]>wrote:

> egasus egasus wrote:
>
>>
>> Same here
>> now i am getting a similar spam attack..
>>
>>
> OK, that's definitely very serious.
>
> First thing I'd suggest is using Eric Helgeson's reCaptcha plugin for
> registration:
>
>
> http://gitorious.org/~erichelgeson/laconica/eric-dev2/trees/recaptcha-plugin<http://gitorious.org/%7Eerichelgeson/laconica/eric-dev2/trees/recaptcha-plugin><
> http://gitorious.org/%7Eerichelgeson/laconica/eric-dev2/trees/recaptcha-plugin
> >
>
> I haven't tried it or tested it but it's probably the best thing to use
> right now.
>
> Second, if you're sure there's a pattern in the user names, try this
> snippet of code in config.php:
>
> http://pastebin.ca/1516064
>
> Change the $nicknamePatterns global variable to suit your needs.
>
> Clearly we have a lot of work to do on the spamming end; at the very least
> we need plugins to support context-oriented tools like Bad Behaviour and
> SURBL as well as content-oriented tools like Bayesian filters, blocklists,
> Akismet, Mollom, and Defensio. More captcha tools and intelligence tests are
> probably worthwhile, too.
>
> -Evan
>
> --
> Evan Prodromou
> CEO, Control Yourself, Inc.
> [email protected] - http://identi.ca/evan - +1-514-554-3826
>
>
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> Laconica-dev mailing list
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>
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