New Forum Feature

I wanted to quickly introduce a new feature for the site: a forum! It’s still a work in progress, but I hope you’ll use it as another resource in the fight against spam. It’s also the “official” place to request data removals/false positives. Let me know, via the forum, what features you would like implemented and I’ll see if I can make it happen.

Forum Link

Threat Scores Flipped

Just a quick note: all of the threat scores have been flipped, meaning, the higher the threat score, the more prolific/widespread a spammer has been recently (capped at 100). This change is to facilitate an easier understanding of visual representations of threat scores (charts) which will be present on the spammer profile pages soon. Right now, we are in the baseline data phase and will be rolling out this feature as soon as possible.

Public API

We’ve just released a public API key which can be used to test the API functionality without registering a personal account first. This is meant for testing purposes only and should not be used on your production websites as it may stop functioning at any time. There are only a limited amount of API calls available daily so if you need to ensure access to the API, please register for an account.

The public API key is, “public”. Use this key in place of your existing API key in query string calls; an example is below:

https://fspamlist.com/api.php?spammer=xrumer&key=public

Additionally, you can just leave off of key parameter and the API will assume you’re using the public key.

For more information on our API, please visit the API page:

Cheers!

10 Years!

Wow. I just realized it’s been 10 years since this site started. As I reflect on that time, I can’t help but think we’ve done some good. I’ve seen highs and lows with this site, and I would like to thank everyone who’s stuck with us these past 10 years. We’ll continue to reside on our little part of the web. We’ll continue to bring you ad-free services (donations and beer for our wonderful host, Steven, are welcome of course). And, we’ll continue to keep fighting the spam on the web.

For our 10 year anniversary update, we’ve done some slight cleanup around the site. I noticed some images were not loading their HTTPS counterparts so I got that fixed (let me know if you find any more). Also, I noticed some links were not pointing to their HTTPS counterparts so that’s taken care of too.

Additionally, we done a few SEO tweaks to try and make our results page stand out. We’ll see how that goes.

Thanks again all.

Here’s to 10 more years!

-Josh

Bugfixes, updates

Hello. Just a note to drop in the blog about bugfixes and updates being performed around the site.

As you may have noticed from the front page news section, the front page spammers now run off of a cache that updates every 5 days. This increases the page loading time for a better experience on the site.

I also found a bug in the API where old wildcard e-mails were not being searched in when performing an API call. The SQL has been updated to include this older data which includes around 3700 wildcard e-mails.

I have also tweaked the process that automatically finds spammers in the API logs based on heuristic information to include …. well …. more heuristics. Based on some preliminary data, this should increase the amount of spammers added to the database by 50%.

Thanks for reading and here’s to a great 2014 for FSpamList!

-Josh

Milestones

Hello everyone! Long time no update. I’m just dropping by to say thank you for the past 5 years! I can’t believe it’s already been that long. I remember messing around with some crude code 5 years ago while I went around collecting spammer information from forums.

Fast track 5 years later, we’ve seen 9.5 hits pass through our spam filters (almost a half a million unique —more stats). That’s a far cry from the few thousand we saw in the early days.

So I just want to say thank you for your continued interest and support of FSpamList (Forum Spam List if you didn’t know). Here’s to another 5 years (and hopefully more improvements 🙂 )

Updates

I’ve done a few things in the backend to make things run a litter faster.

First, I’ve moved all of the spammers that haven’t been seen since 2009 out of the main db, but still made them searchable via the web interface. The API calls no longer will have to sort through those.

Second, I am now caching a large number of the latest reported spammers so the API looks in the cache first. The cache is updated daily.

As for a new feature, I have taken out the old “threat” level system that was basically useless and turned it into information you can actually use. The new threat system automatically gives a rating to each and every spammer based on a number of factors such as when the spammer was reported, when it was last seen, and the number of times it has been reported. Values close to 0 are more of a threat. In the future, I would like to implement a threat history so you can see how a spammer’s threat has increased or decreased over time. These threat levels can be seen on a spammer’s profile page.

“Add” Page Removed

In the interest in keeping the spam database full of only legitimate spammers, we have decided to stop accepting spammers via our “Add” spammers page. We are currently developing a set of tools that will provide other means of collecting spam data for your protection. Thank you all who have submitted spammers via that page in the past.

We look forward to continually serving you.