Output Stream of Consciousness

While looking into new users who had joined my forum, I would find plenty that had joined up with many blogs over the past little while. Others were nowhere else to be found on the web, but when I went looking for the domain name in question, I got a pleasant surprise. I discovered the Spam Suicide site.

Right on the very front page, there is a warning in front of the link to the forums on Spam Suicide:

Warning! DO NOT register on the forum unless you are one of those nasty automated spambots who do nothing but annoy legitimate forum users and make forum administrators' lives a complete nightmare.

SPAM ONLY > > > > >forum< < < < < SPAM ONLY

If you are a real person please DO NOT join the Spamsuicide forum

Spambots cannot resist a forum. In particular, they cannot resist trying to automatically join a forum run by the popular PHPBB2 (PHP Bulletin Board 2).

(I guess, sadly, that MWForum is on the list that bots will join - ah well, I won't move to manual approval unless I start getting inundated)

The reason why Spamsuicide is such a nifty idea is that automatic registrations have to be done by clicking through a link that is sent out by the forum. This means that there has to be at least a real e-mail address of some sort used to collect the registration message and 'click' the verification link contained in it.

The registered forum account will then typically lie fallow for a short time before spam messages start getting posted through it.

With a great bloody big message up front saying "Don't join!", only spambots and the very occasional dum-dum will create accounts on Spamsuicide. So if you see an e-mail address or an entire domain listed on Spamsuicide, then you can rest 99% assured that if you have a user join and it has one of those addresses as its e-mail address, that you can delete that user without hesitation.

(The 1% caveat is that the web site author solicits spammer addresses from others, and there's a possibility someone innocent might get trapped in there)

Nice work :)