Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

205 submissions , 163 unreviewed
5,047 questions , 2,200 unanswered
5,345 answers , 22,709 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
816 active unimported users
More ...

  We are facing spam attacks

+ 2 like - 0 dislike
634 views

Maybe, some people have noted that we are facing spam attacks since last night

http://www.physicsoverflow.org/13810/blocking-spam-ip-addresses

The spamming from unregistered IPs is getting worse, so I have (temporarily) set the permissions to post questions, answers, and comments to "Registered users", until we find a better solution for these issues.

If this does not help either, might even have to set the permissions to post anything to "Registered users with email address confirmed" ...

asked Apr 7, 2014 in Announcements by Dilaton (6,240 points) [ no revision ]
recategorized Apr 7, 2014 by dimension10

I think I have a better solution, but you'll have to wait, as I have a horrible internet connection since a few days.  

1 Answer

+ 1 like - 0 dislike

I have fixed the issues and now let anyone post. The reason for delay is just my poor internet connection and database connect error becoming worse exactly at the moment that I try to save a setting and then they decide to clear all the changes (especially annoying for the "censored words" change). 

I have did the following: 

  • Enabled our ReCaptcha plugin; I have registered a new ReCaptcha key which you can see from Admin/Plugins. Admins: The private key should not be revealed to non-admins, please!  
  • Added words used in the spam messages to the list of censored words. Never thought this would be useful! Don't worry, the spam messages used a lot of words in non-English languages (Spanish and Japanese) so I censored those words so anyone who tries to post these words cannot post the message. It is unlikely that users would want to speak in non-English languages here (right?).     

    But it is to be noted that I do not understand neither of these languages, so I can only hope that I have chosen common words. Anyone who knows these languages are welcome to comment. The spam posts are too messy for me to use google translate on them : (  

I am actually rather surprised that we encountered this problem, Q2A uses a pretty impressive (to me) mechanism to stop spam (hidden URL fields).  

answered Apr 7, 2014 by dimension10 (1,985 points) [ no revision ]

Your answer

Please use answers only to (at least partly) answer questions. To comment, discuss, or ask for clarification, leave a comment instead.
To mask links under text, please type your text, highlight it, and click the "link" button. You can then enter your link URL.
Please consult the FAQ for as to how to format your post.
This is the answer box; if you want to write a comment instead, please use the 'add comment' button.
Live preview (may slow down editor)   Preview
Your name to display (optional):
Privacy: Your email address will only be used for sending these notifications.
Anti-spam verification:
If you are a human please identify the position of the character covered by the symbol $\varnothing$ in the following word:
p$\hbar$ys$\varnothing$csOverflow
Then drag the red bullet below over the corresponding character of our banner. When you drop it there, the bullet changes to green (on slow internet connections after a few seconds).
Please complete the anti-spam verification




user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...