[scorched_675]

Verticalscope admins.. the spammers are out of control again.

any chance your all knowing, glorious CTO, will make a decision on upgrading to 4.x where there are better modules to help? Or is it still stuck on you guys don't want to pay internet brands any money to upgrade the license? or figure out why i can no longer see the vbstopformspam logs in the statistics and logs area?

kinda sucks that you guys bought this place from me and I was able to keep it on the most up to date version. And here we are almost 3 years later and you guys just soak up the profits and you can't even keep us up to date on version 3.x? 3.8.7 has been out for almost 11 months!! And were still on 3.8.1?! If I remember, we were on 3.7. and you have managed to upgrade us only 1 time in 3 years? Jeez, when I bought the site I darn near immediately updated us from 2.x to 3.x.

So seriously wtf do you guys actually do all day? I can only guess that it is a very typical IT shop where people do busy work of nothing to pass the day. And then tell everyone how hard they work.

It's no wonder I get paid a ridiculous amount of money to consult to the fortune 100 and top government CIO's on how to maintain IT the likes that verticalscope can only dream of. Because people can't even understand basic IT operations and maintenance but some make it to management and then fail miserably. It's called the peter principle, people get promoted to their highest level of incompetency, which shows why after 15 years in IT I am just a lowly enterprise architect and not a CTO or CIO. It's always funny how nervous everyone gets when I get brought in, because I get 90 minute interviews with every single member of the staff, and just like office space you have to justify keeping your job as I plan how to reorganize and optimize the environment.

I help these high degree lead companies and agencies plan their entire IT infrastructure and were not talking maintaining a measly few hundred to one thousand sights running on a few dozen or even 100 servers, were talking global operations with tens of thousands of servers, software packages, websites, portals, Oracle, SAP, SAS, JD Edwards, all of them on planned capacity, performance, and maintenance schedules with life cycles that boggle the mind to the tune of changing entire systems every 18-24 months.
Some of my smallest customers store in excess of 10PB, and some range as high as 100PB, yes thats 10,000TB-100,000TB. I even have one customer where each storage admin manages 1.6PB, and each of the server admins manages in excess of 200 physical servers, those servers then run at least 1500 virtual machines. So again I ask what the VS staff does, where they can barely keep up with the measly few hundred or so sites you might have? That would be 1 person's job in my world, 2 if you wanted to split the workload and have a backup person while the 1-2 software specialist would plan, test and maintain the sites on a regular schedule. And yet VS has what 50 employees for how many sites?

God damn good thing I am not the CIO/CTO as I sure as hell would clean house.

I hope my request to Jerry to buy the site back can happen. Am sure VS want's way too much though. but we will see.

 

[shalihe74]

Go, Heathster, go!

As an aside, I perma-banned "kwasiy" - spamming Nigerian scam-esque PMs to users.

 

[Jstu202]

This is getting pretty ridiculous, I mean.. I don't mind removing spammers once in awhile. But overall, it makes the whole site look bad, especially when these spammers are getting into member's private mail.

Heath kept this place tip top before it went to VS. They don't even bother looking at anything except the front page of our forum. (Two new sub forums at the bottom were added for no reason other than the fact that they were too "busy" to notice that we already had what we needed).

Maybe we can get the members to help get this site back to you Heath, who knows?

Go, Heathster, go!

As an aside, I perma-banned "kwasiy" - spamming Nigerian scam-esque PMs to users.

But I was just about to donate money to his cause...

 

[administrator]

vbStopForumSpam was temporarily disabled after I got several emails from different people who complained they couldn't register because their email and/or IP address was spoofed and appeared on the vbSFS database.

Not all spammers are bots. Some are real people who are familiar with a forum's capabilities, hence the private message spam.

All of our sites are due for an upgrade to VB4, however we are currently working out the performance issues that VB4 possesses. We've upgraded several of our sites already but have gotten a fair number of complaints about VB4 being slower. This is a common complaint about VB4 in general - just search Google and you'll see for yourself. And VB4 does not offer any extra anti-spam measures that we don't already employ.

Secondly, I have always been on top of the spam in this forum. As soon as I see an email about a reported spam post, I'm in there to clean it. But like most people, I don't work weekends, which is why you guys got to it before I did.

Fact is, there is no surefire way to prevent spam unless the forums are put on admin validation.

 

[scorched_675]

once again i say WTF?
just because people complain do you just blindly disallow the whole thing? Or do what your supposed to do as an IT person and research the issue before making a change? It's called change management invoked by root cause analysis! Was the root cause of the person being on an international spammers database the fault of this forum? NO!! Therefore not conclusive evidence to stop the spam software and opening the floodgates to the spammers.

Had you done the research, you would know that you can simply redirect them to stopforumspam.com and have them request to get their information cleared. Typically within 24-48 hours they will be cleared and can be registered, but no, a typical overreaction, so that in the end the many suffered because of the few!? Seriously what was your thought process? Again, its why I am justified in getting paid to make decisions for massive corporations because people don't stop and think before acting.

And saying that that there are no additional enhancements in 4.x is plain wrong. SAP the massive application that it is, is worthless without customization or modules. And vbulletin 4.x by itself may not be better, but it has the capability to run newer "supported" modules. The module vbStopForumSpam has been deprecated for over 2 years, long before I asked you to install it. But it was better than having nothing at all!! And now the newer Spam-o-Matic for vb4 only is much improved but can we have that on 3.x? NO!! And I can assure you that the number of spammers you get is notified on, is a fraction of a percent of what myself and the other admins have been handling. It's pretty rare to actually get the notification where a user finds the spam before John, Shauna or myself do. So lets not kid ourselves here.

As for performance problems, welcome to IT. Maybe the new vb4 sql queries should be used as stored procedures instead of requiring cpu and memory intensive compilations. Could be they did too many stored procedures and nobody increased the mysql query_cache_size. Could be that mysql should be updated ? I know version 5.5 is available and were still on 5.1? Even 6.0.11 is available which has known improvements in stored procedures. Possible that the memory overhead associated to having more php/css pages included in the new version require more memory per VM. All I know is the few minutes of research I did shows that quite a lot of the performance issues you're alluding to are no longer prevalent in 4.1.x.

I invite you to try finding real performance issues on an Oracle or Sybase data warehouse where just a single table is over 100TB spread across several hundred drives attached to huge storage area network where everything from a mainframe to solaris, aix, hp-ux, windows and linux are all running simultaneous queries so that some big name oil companies can locate the next oil and gas reserves and every minute they don't find it costs them potential revenue. Or try troubleshooting performance on the upcoming BlueGene Q supercomputer for LLNL where the 50+PB lustre/zfs combined file system compromised of 22,500 disk drives served by 480 storage nodes attached to the approx 2800 linux OSS nodes needs to provide 1TB/s of throughput to the IBM compute nodes. So the point being, what you're troubleshoot is mice nuts compared to whats out there and you guys still can't get things done in a reasonable time with the few hundred sites you have.

And I had the forum on admin validation at one time but decided that since your the ones getting paid for it now instead of me, that it wasn't worth my time. But I always fall back to caring about the people on this forum and not being taken care of by the "Driven by enthusiasts" Verticalscope team.

 

[administrator]

So ONE spammer got through and sent a bunch of PM's to people. The 6 other spam accounts that registered over the weekend didn't make any posts at all. I'd hardly call that "opening the floodgates".

Heath, I'm not a server admin. I'm the forum admin. My job is to report technical issues to the SysAdmins if need be, like if the search doesn't work properly, etc. Otherwise I'm simply here to keep the spam minimal, make sure non-vendors aren't selling, mods are moderating, helping members with any issues they may have like account registration or forgotten passwords, the basics. All that extra stuff you mentioned...Sybase, LLNL, I don't even know what that is. That's not my job here.

If you would like to bring your concerns regarding the forums to our CTO, I'll be more than happy to give you his email.

 

[scorched_675]

Do you honestly believe this is about a single weekend? Yeah were not talking thousand of spammers, but it has certainly been at least 6 that I got rid of that actually made posts recently before anyone noticed.
You admitted you had that vbstopforumspam module disabled, and it easily has to be over a month, because I have not been able to see the logs since December and then as of yesterday when my complaint was voiced in coocoo's nest it's magically back when you probably re-enabled it.

I can tell you I personally have ejected a dozen or so potential spammers in the last 30 days, not to mention what the other admins have done. I have added IP's blocks to the ban list when i can see where they are coming from and the ranges associated to them. I am the one who asked for the module to be added, I am the one who changed the account creation profile questions to temporarily block the spammers who run scripts to get.

So if you're so dedicated to stopping spammers, please tell me the hell it is that you do?

I have already asked Jerry Orban to set up a call with the CTO or see what it would take to sell the site back to me, where the community can prosper again, out from under the bloated bureaucratic weight of VS.

 

[scorched_675]

And why is it that my two other admins still don't have the capability to admin the site? They sent the NDA's in, and I don't have high enough admin level to troubleshoot why it doesn't work. And that's been what 6 months now?!

 

[administrator]

I registered a secondary account to test the anti-spam measures. I got the "how many cylinders does a 675 have?" question. Yes the answer is 3, anyone can Google the answer to that. So how did a spammer get past that? It's called he was a human, not a program. So please tell me Heath how you are supposed to counteract those kinds of spammers? What other measures would you like to be seen implemented?

 

[administrator]

And why is it that my two other admins still don't have the capability to admin the site? They sent the NDA's in, and I don't have high enough admin level to troubleshoot why it doesn't work. And that's been what 6 months now?!

I've only been with VerticalScope for 4 months, so I'll have to inquire about that.

 

[scorched_675]

List of spammers I have found that came in within the last 3 days, that you missed:
suzanne25 2012-1-29
WestLmao 2012-1-30
Jorja Cleland 2012-1-27

Dec:
Macaumain 2011-12-29
autoinsuranceb01 2011-12-29
SEASON02 2011-12-29 - suspicious more research needed.

So lets see according to you that ONE spammer, and 6 others is now one spammer and 9 false registrations which we know would be used by a spammer at sometime in the future. And the 3 more I found from Dec in just the few moments I spent looking, But you're right, there was no floodgates, just the potential for it. But still proves my point. And as I mentioned earlier funny that the log almost to the day was disabled for 30 days. :thumbup:

Spent a few more minutes looking.
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[administrator]

There's nothing "funny" about it...I already told you I disabled it due to the dozen or so members that emailed me complaining they were being flagged as spammers and couldn't register. I've since turned it back on.

You mentioned WestLmao as being something I missed....vbStopForumSpam missed that too. Log says he was allowed registration.

Guess no module, or person, is perfect.

 

[scorched_675]

I did go back and edit the rest that were missed. And of course no one is perfect, no software, no hardware. But you can't honestly say that VS is actually "trying" can you. You left it off for an entire month, and that turned into at least 2-3 spammers a day getting registered.

But you say a dozen or so contacted you? Sorry but I call shenanigans on that one, 12+ whole people emailed you to say they were on the global spammer list? BS! You only get on that list because of registering at another forum and getting flagged as a spammer. If there IPs was spoofed then again something doesn't add up.
As for WestLmao, yes of course there is no chance we can get to ZERO as was previously stated, but if I were in control of the forum I could easily write a script to not only cross reference the stopforumspam database but check with DNS RBL lists to help combat it better.

But I ask, if your the "spam" fighter why not coordinate efforts on all the forums? Why because it's the typical inefficient IT organization just like all others. You could easily automate as I suggested above, and you can even download an updated list of spammer ip's every hour or so and appended it to the databases to pro-actively block them with a fairly simple script. Or better yet we could move to VB4 and have the new stopformspam module called spam-o-matic installed which has auto moderation and punitive actions for automatically updating the global spammer database..
damn those logical decisions available!!!

Or better yet hire some network genius that should be able to use the RBL lists to form ACL's and see if they can also be applied to the DNS to stop queries from rogue areas, thereby denying access in the first place. Hell my home firewalls start at an outer perimeter with a simple netgear to provide easy access for friends and family on systems that don't need high security, next is my FIPS 140-2 certified ASIC based firewall, it runs heuristic algorithms that I can program for almost anything including protection of databases behind it, then is my cisco catalyst 2960G with ACL's to all said prevent 10 times more problems than you guys at VS are capable of thinking about. The FIPS firewall further runs my Unified threat management system linked to my families laptops so that no matter where they are they have policies driven from my management control, and can VPN behind the first firewall for access to all my systems and are constantly logging intrusion detections and forwarding the results home in case of compromise, I can remotely kill the systems, but strangely in the 5 years or so since setting up my system, nobody in my family really get viruses, hacked, or has very much spam. WHY BECAUSE I KNOW WTF I AM DOING!!

So just keep bringing the non-sense rhetorical reasoning for not doing your jobs properly, and proving why VS is full of the typical IT people I take to school all day long and make a few hundred grand a year doing so.

Because there are way to make things better you just have to be motived to learn how to do so! And that part is obvious to those suffering out here in the forums.

There's nothing "funny" about it...I already told you I disabled it due to the dozen or so members that emailed me complaining they were being flagged as spammers and couldn't register. I've since turned it back on.

You mentioned WestLmao as being something I missed....vbStopForumSpam missed that too. Log says he was allowed registration.

Guess no module, or person, is perfect.