I was being sarcastic. My point is I feel that Net admins are getting confused as to what should/shouldn't be spam. Too much focus is being used on whether a URL is in a quit message and less focus on how a network or atleast the software can be improved.
If you educate your users they won't click the links to start with .. user education requires less IRCd resources. If we continue to cover/block/filter all the bad out of IRC then we will end up with a bloated IRCd leading to latency and a further disrepect for IRC.
"Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime." -unknown
Away Message
Configuration - https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Configuration
FAQ - https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/FAQ
FAQ - https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/FAQ
Hi, I have been following this topic since its start with interest, although with little motivation to contribute, however yesterday we were hit by over 100 bots, they joined the largest public channels and on join pmed people (you can imagine the annoyance of having 100 pm's in a single go). Their pm's were all in turkish, although there was no common theme that I could see that would enable a spamfilter to be added that wouldn't affect the legitimate turkish users (no matter how much i would like to get rid of them)
I also noticed what was relevent to this thread - they all had away messages pointed to a few websites, blatent spam that people will click on (especially the turks). I presume these sites were loaded with a payload that would enable the spreading of this bot. At the time i was not on a machine that logged and did not have time to do much more than attempt to stem the flow of bots. Looking through my logs again today i see that we were attacked again by the bots. It is my intention to get the opers to collect all pm messages and away messages so that we can form a nice list, but in the long term an away message spamfilter would be nice.
I know that spamfilter was intended primarily for spam, to which we use to great affect, however we and i'm sure a large number of other networks also use it to control bots amongst their other techniques. I think this /away message is a clear attempt to evade the spamfilter
katsklaw:
Alas, user education is only adequate a limited amount of time, I'm sure that we could educate most of our regular users not to click on unknown links, and i'm sure that most never do anyway (we recently got rid of the stupid channels (hooray)
), but there are lots of naive users that we do not have time to educate, or they obtain their viruses on other networks. The problem of irc bots and spam is not just limited to your own network, it spreads throughout networks, every small reduction in their spread is necessary because it balloons one stupid person probably has 10 stupid friends, who each have 10 more, you all know how these things work. They rapidly grow out of control. If I can stop just one pm virus pm message going to our users then i am happy, because that is one less potential problem that i have to worry about.
irc is an easy place to pick up viruses i don't think we will ever resolve the situation fully, it is the responsibility of all to reduce the problem, users, opers, and ircd coders alike. The ultimate solution would be to shun *@*, but that is obviously impractical, bubblewrap is the only solution and that means giving the opers the ability to add as much bubblewrap as possible.
Sorry about my rambling, metaphors and tangents, but i hope you can see what i am trying to say
I also noticed what was relevent to this thread - they all had away messages pointed to a few websites, blatent spam that people will click on (especially the turks). I presume these sites were loaded with a payload that would enable the spreading of this bot. At the time i was not on a machine that logged and did not have time to do much more than attempt to stem the flow of bots. Looking through my logs again today i see that we were attacked again by the bots. It is my intention to get the opers to collect all pm messages and away messages so that we can form a nice list, but in the long term an away message spamfilter would be nice.
I know that spamfilter was intended primarily for spam, to which we use to great affect, however we and i'm sure a large number of other networks also use it to control bots amongst their other techniques. I think this /away message is a clear attempt to evade the spamfilter
katsklaw:
Alas, user education is only adequate a limited amount of time, I'm sure that we could educate most of our regular users not to click on unknown links, and i'm sure that most never do anyway (we recently got rid of the stupid channels (hooray)
), but there are lots of naive users that we do not have time to educate, or they obtain their viruses on other networks. The problem of irc bots and spam is not just limited to your own network, it spreads throughout networks, every small reduction in their spread is necessary because it balloons one stupid person probably has 10 stupid friends, who each have 10 more, you all know how these things work. They rapidly grow out of control. If I can stop just one pm virus pm message going to our users then i am happy, because that is one less potential problem that i have to worry about.irc is an easy place to pick up viruses i don't think we will ever resolve the situation fully, it is the responsibility of all to reduce the problem, users, opers, and ircd coders alike. The ultimate solution would be to shun *@*, but that is obviously impractical, bubblewrap is the only solution and that means giving the opers the ability to add as much bubblewrap as possible.
Sorry about my rambling, metaphors and tangents, but i hope you can see what i am trying to say
Probably some of you noticed this already, but... I think it's good to end this thread with this message anyway...
We've implemented the 'away' spamfilter target (well, 11 days ok), so this will be in 3.2.2.
I do agree that if people would be wise enough not to click links and stuff, then we wouldn't really need any of these spam thingies.
Unfortunately, judging from thousand of other situations and analogies, I don't have such strong beliefs in the human race :(.
We've implemented the 'away' spamfilter target (well, 11 days ok), so this will be in 3.2.2.
I do agree that if people would be wise enough not to click links and stuff, then we wouldn't really need any of these spam thingies.
Unfortunately, judging from thousand of other situations and analogies, I don't have such strong beliefs in the human race :(.