Received a harassing private message?

[PRIME1]

kj4350

What a sad little person this must be.

[Meadows]

What a sad little person this must be.

The way they always say the exact same things (often to the last letter) leads me to believe they may be automated.

[integer]

What a sad little person this must be.

The way they always say the exact same things (often to the last letter) leads me to believe they may be automated.

Yes, seems so... [Google]

[axeman]

What a sad little person this must be.

The way they always say the exact same things (often to the last letter) leads me to believe they may be automated.

Yes, seems so... [Google]

Ahem, it seems TR readers are a little more bright than those at Anandtech; a few people there took this "person's" comments as something to be retaliated against.

[Madman]

Some sort of javascript or captcha could fend those bots off. It really takes a lot of time to write a crawler that understands scripts. Heck, even google bot is not crawling them.

Then you can always change identifiers of buttons so that the internal id of submit is cancel and cancel is submit.

But darn, those bots are getting annoying, and they attack everything in sight.

One more thing, do those bots have the same browser ID string, maybe you could filter them that way.

[Shinare]

Textual Confirmation stopped bots cold on my phpbb forum. I was getting 10's of bots signing up a day and this cut them all out.

[Kevin]

Some sort of javascript or captcha could fend those bots off.

phpBB 3 already comes with CAPTCHA. It's obviously not working well.

Textual Confirmation stopped bots cold on my phpbb forum. I was getting 10's of bots signing up a day and this cut them all out.

That's for phpBB 2, we upgraded to 3 awhile ago.

[bhtooefr]

phpBB 3 already comes with CAPTCHA. It's obviously not working well.

Many CAPTCHAs have been broken already. Besides, I almost wonder if it's a Slashdot-style copy-and-paste troll, not a bot.

[NeXus 6]

I got a very nasty one from ol5350. Please ban them.

[Kevin]

Done.

[Kevin]

kx6660 banned. Did it yesterday when I noticed the name in the member list, but didn't post here until now.

[jill]

I received this in my e-mail from Yahoo answers
I don't know what to think of it
I have never received anything like this
if you could help to prevent this from happening to others
I would be grateful
Thank you, jill


From: lk7600

Subject: retard

Message: Can you please ******* die? Preferably by getting crushed to death in a garbage compactor, by getting your face cut to ribbons with a pocketknife, your head cracked open with a baseball bat, your stomach sliced open and your entrails spilled out, and your eyeballs ripped out of their sockets. *beep* *****


I would love to kick you hard in the face, breaking it. Then I'd cut your stomach open with a chainsaw, exposing your intestines. Then I'd cut your windpipe in two with a boxcutter. Then I'd tie you to the back of a pickup truck, and drag you, until your useless *beep* corpse was torn to a million *beep* useless, bloody, and gory pieces.

Hopefully you'll get what's coming to you. *beep* *****


I really hope that you get curb-stomped. It'd be hilarious to see you begging for help, and then someone stomps on the back of your head, leaving you to die in horrible, agonizing pain. *beep*

Shut the *beep* up f *****, before you get your face bashed in and cut to ribbons, and your throat slit.

[bhtooefr]

It's just someone (or maybe even a bot) that's very bored. Just ignore it, report it to whoever is in control of the site if possible, and move on.

[Kevin]

lk7200 has been banned.

[Kevin]

hk6900 has been banned.

[UberGerbil]

Here's a relatively subtle one (not harassing or private, but spam):
http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=929918#p929918

[PRIME1]

lk9800

[PRIME1]

kktk5950

[Meadows]

[multiple names]

I wonder why you are harrassed of all people now.

[Kevin]

mvik9950 and kktk5950 have been banned.

[BIF]

I have not received one of these, but I did notice a naming convention.

lowercase alpha, literal lowercase "k", numeric (usually 4 chars)

or some iteration of such.

lk9999
tkak9999

This may lend a clue to "what" or "who".

I read that pm that "Jill" got (see above). Inexcusable. Makes me angry. Somebody like that writer needs to be institutionalized for his/her own safety, as well as the safety of society in general.

Oh sure, the message(s) may be distributed by bots today, but I still think that some deranged, mentally ill PERSON originally wrote it.