HUGE UPDATE! With Tips!

This one’s for the books ladies and gentlemen! As foreshadowed in my previous post, I have finished updating the add function to accept a large number of spammers at one time, given that they are separated by a comma.

That’s a big personal leap for me because that alway has been my intention for this online database. Who wants to enter names in one by one? Not me.

Here’s a tip: If you’ve ever done any looking around, you’d know that spammer lists are often posted in blogs and or forums vertically and without commas. Well, the workaround is simple.

Here is a list of spammers that were posted at TheAdminZone forums.

forumspamlist1.JPG

This is a common way to share known spammers. Here, all the data has something in common. First, they are all e-mail addresses (and that is good in this case). Second, they all contain “*@” (good, that is the proper way to use wildcards). Well, all you would have to do is copy and paste those names into your favorite text editor (notepad, or such) and use the replace function to replace “*@” (asterisk, @ symbol) with “,*@” (comma, asterisk, & @ symbol). That will give you something that looks like this:

forumspamlist2.JPG

Now all you have to do is delete the first comma as there is no spammer e-mail in front of it. Even thought the separating commas aren’t on the same line as the e-mail addresses, they are the next thing after an e-mail address therefore it will work. Now, of course this is a rather short list, so it may be faster just to put the commas in manually, but, this tut is for bigger lists.

Now with usernames or other data that doesn’t contain any like text (e.g. *@) You’ll have to try a little trickier method.

If you come across a list of VERTICAL (meaning listed on multiple lines) USERNAMES (that contain no like data on the ends), copy and paste that list into MS Word (may have the functionality needed on others). From there, press ctrl+F to bring up the find menu, then click on “Replace”. Tell Word to look for a”Manual Line Break” . This can be accomplished by clicking on “More >>” and then “Special”. A menu will come up and choose “Manual Line Break”. You can skip all that by knowing that a manual line break is represented by “^l” (an el “L”) , just enter that in the “Find what” box. Next, just put a comma “,” in the Replace with box. What this does is replace all the line breaks with a comma “,” thus making a comma separated list in one line.

Here is a picture:

forumspamlist3.JPG

There, that’s it. Just copy and paste the edited text in the add page of Fspamlist.

I know my instructions aren’t that clear. If you have any questions just drop them in the comments section of this post.

Stats:
Spammers in the database: 2506
That’s an increase of 455 since last counted.

Index Page Views: 496
That’s an increase of 222 since last counted.

Get Ready

With A LOT help from a friend (thanks Jay), I figured out a way for the multiple names entry when adding spammers into the database to work.

So, forget adding spammers into the database 1 by 1, soon you’ll be able to enter as many names as you want at a time! I find this to be a GREAT thing for the database. Expect the database to increase ten-fold in the coming weeks. I’ve now have to work out an export system that will limit the amount of names it can export.

And, Jay also helped me tighten security a tad. So expect new things in the future!

Something I’ve noticed.

When I originally wrote the FSpamlist database program, I was originally writing it for phpBB. Looking around in phpBB’s ban list options, I noticed it said this:

To specify more than one email address, separate them with commas. To specify a wildcard username, use * like *@hotmail.com

Now I automatically assumed that ALL wildcard (*) locations would work. So, if I wanted to have a wildcard after the @ symbol I could. For example, if I wanted to ban every single e-mail from the .ru domain, I would add *@*.ru to the ban list. That should work right? Well I went to phpBB.com to investigate. Once I was there I noticed that someone had come up with a ban list update that WOULD allow you to use multiple wildcards in your ban list. Here is the description:

Upgrades the ability to use wilcards in banning email adresses by allowing the banning of entire groups of domains. For isnstance, just adding *@yahoo.* to the ban list, will ban email addresses at all of yahoo’s many international email domains, such as yahoo.com, yahoo.co.uk, yahoo.de, etc.

But reading further in the forum, I can see that this mod didn’t work all the time. But towards the end of the thread, I noticed that one person said that he/she installed it on 2.0.22 and it worked perfectly..

So, I am pretty sure that a modification is needed to make the 10 spammers that are currently in the database with the *@* wildcard method to work. I am not sure there is a definite solution yet. If you want to check the thread over @ phpbb, follow this link:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=160638

Changelog, Site Updates

Whew, it’s been a long night of updating the site..

I would like to introduce the FSpamlist.com forum. It’s located @ http://www.fspamlist.com/forum . Here we can discuss everything spam and everything FSpamlist! Want to see a feature on the site? We want to hear from you! Do you have a large list of forum spammer’s names that you would like to submit, but don’t want to enter them one by one on the main site? There’s a section for that in the forum! So head on over and let’s get to crackin’ down some spam!

I’ve seen a need for more features on the site… They are as follows:

-Updated cosmetics a tad
-Searches return the number of matching data instead of just saying “Match(es) Found” e.g. “42 Matches Found”
-Added spammer’s name at the top of the Spammer Profile Pages (accessible by clicking on a spammer’s name after a search)
– Added the ability to add comments about a spammer on the Spammer Profile Pages. Now you can tell others why that name is listed. Any text can be added; you can add what kind of link the spammer posts, or how often the spammer posts, ect, ect,… use it for anything. (Note: You need a valid e-mail address to comment on a spammer. You will be sent a confirmation e-mail with an authorization code inside.)
-Changed one of the randomized goofy spam pictures that shows on the Spammer Profile Page (send in more funny pictures to josh -at- fspamlist -dot- com to be rotated)

Stats:
Unique Spammers:? 2051
Index Page Views: 274

Changelog

Done with a preliminary version of the flag erroneous spammer data function that was mentioned in my previous post. It too can be accessed from the Spammer Profile Page via a link at the bottom of the page.

All flagged entries will be evaluated by me. No flagged entry can be deleted by anyone else.

I’ll be updating it in the coming days. I’ll add some security mesures to check against false-false-positives… haha

Changelog

Added a link to search Google with the spammer data to see if any matches show. This may be helpful in confirming the validity and or threat of a spammer. To see this link, click on a spammer’s name/email/or ip address to go to the spammer profile page. From there, you can scroll down to the bottom to click on the Google link.

P.S. I’ve noticed a funny name in the database (weird characters). I’ve since deleted it and I’ve decided to implement a flag system in which users can flag a name that they think is a false positive or faulty. I’ll be working on this in the coming days.

New Updates….

Welcome to the Official FSpamlist blog!

I’ve been fiddling around with the database today and I’ve added a couple things…

New Features:
-Moved to a better server (thanks: HASTYHOST.COM)
-Got domain name: http://www.fspamlist.com (Update your bookmarks)
-Cleaned up web-interface look (fonts,tables, ect)
-Spammer Profile Pages
-This blog!

This blog is so I can inform fspamlist’s users of stats,news,and upcoming features. I also want to hear from you in the comments… I want to hear site suggestions, how I can improve the database, and general info that I might not know about.

Hopefully this will be a great tool for all of our benefit.

If you don’t know what FSpamlist is, please read this page.

Stats:
Spammers names/emails/ip addresses in database: 1540