How do we stop Forum Genie?

[digitalhome]

I'm tired of lightblondevagina.biz and all this crap.

The Problem is something called Forum Genie

From the site:

The Forum Genie can import thousands of Bulletin boards at a time and then register you to all of them in a fraction of the time it takes to manually register yourself. In the time it takes for a normal person to register on 4 Bulletin Board, The Forum Genie can register you on a hundred! After your registered on hundreds (or thousands) of Forums you can use the Forum Genie to send thousands of on topic and categorized messages.

The site that sells it has Google AdSense ads.

I emailed google and told them that it violates the adsense rules. I recommend other contact Google also.

I also contacted HotScripts and said that I would ask Forum admins to boycott Hotscripts unless they removed the offending script.

I recommend others do so also.


PLEASE POST ways that we can stop this problem. Rather than banning IP's and all the rest lets go after the guys that produce this crap and make their lives miserable.

Here is the companies email also [email protected]

They seem to be hosted at http://ev1servers.net/english/index.asp but not sure so maybe we can contact the hosting company

[digitalhome]

sent a note to the hosting company

I read this on your site.

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
BEGINNING IMMEDIATELY, anyone hosting websites or services on their server that support spammers or cause any of our IP space to be listed in any of the various Spam Databases will have their server immediately removed from our network. The server will not be reconnected until such time that you agree to remove ANY and ALL traces of the offending material immediately upon reconnection and agree to allow us access to the server to confirm that all material has been COMPLETELY removed. Severe violations may result in immediate and permanent removal of the server from our network without notice to the customer. Any server guilty of a second violation WILL be immediately and permanently removed from our network without notice.

This website http://xxx.xxxxx.net/ has produced a software script called forum Genie that is spamming tens of thousands of forum websites.

Here is what the site says what the software does

The Forum Genie can import thousands of Bulletin boards at a time and then register you to all of them in a fraction of the time it takes to manually register yourself. In the time it takes for a normal person to register on 4 Bulletin Board, The Forum Genie can register you on a hundred! After your registered on hundreds (or thousands) of Forums you can use the Forum Genie to send thousands of on topic and categorized messages.

This product is allowing spammers to advertise pornographic links on tens of thousands of links and therefore I believe violates your terms of agreement

[Beav]

I've had two of these register in the last two days, although only one managed to post before they were banned.

From what I can see they still have to activate where necessary, but how are they managing to get around the Image verification? The registration page states this is to stop automated signups, but it's not stopping them on mine

[digitalhome]

but how are they managing to get around the Image verification?

Don't know but it's apparent from the number of people complaining here that it can be all manual!

[edogs]

At first we must say that we don't think that creators of "forum Genie" are spammers. Did you got at least one ads e-mail from them?
So we belive that writing to google and to hosting company will give no result, better to hurry up and find other solution. Same way you can accusse to microsoft in spam, because they create mail client - "outlook express" which allow to have multiple e-mail addresses in Cc/Bcc field and this way to send one e-mail to many peoples.

Coming back to topic.
We think that e-mail confirmation and moderation of new members are enough good solution.

[digitalhome]

Using that facile logic, the forums don't have spammers because they aren't sending out emails to any members.

The only reason this script exists is to Spam forums which in my estimation makes this company accessories to the crime.

Using your logic: I could become an Internet Service provider that set up servers for no other reason than to allow spammers to send out a billion emails a day. I would not be a "spammer" but I would be culpable.

[edogs]

digitalhome
As the matter of fact we can only say that creators of weapons were never responsible for their use, and successfully sale it all other the world, though it's enough obvious that weapon created to kill and killing are bad.
We are not going to argue if we are right or wrong. We can be right. We can be wrong.

The only thing we recomend, is not to relay only on google and hosting provider, but in addition to make actions yourself : e-mail confirmation and moderation of new members are enough good solution.
We think it's good idea. Again, we can be wrong or right in this judgement.

[Beav]

email confirmation doesn't stop them, nor does image verification, and I don't see why I should have to moderate all new members, even if we only get a couple a day. Ideally we need a fix, if it's possible.

[digitalhome]

As the matter of fact we can only say that creators of weapons were never responsible for their use, and successfully sale it all other the world, though it's enough obvious that weapon created to kill and killing are bad.

uhh, whatever the heck that means?

But I have to respond because I think in some weird way (and using an incredibly silly analogy I might add) you're saying that people who build bombs aren't responsible for their use.

So according to your logic: If I build an atomic bomb and then sell it to Al Quada or North Korea then I'm not responsible when they drop it on New York City because "creators of weapons were never responsible for their use"


Beav,

I agree, hence why I'm posting.

The solution could be programmed (jelsoft any thoughts?) or we can work to shut down companies like Forum Genie who are producing the tools whose only purpose is to screw up our forums

[John Campbell]

what do you want to do?

your asking vbulletin to fix it? Over on vb.org there is a hack by nail geek I belive... that lets you post in fourms but you need to answer the image text.

[edogs]

So according to your logic: If I build an atomic bomb and then sell it to Al Quada or North Korea then I'm not responsible when they drop it on New York City because "creators of weapons were never responsible for their use"

Oh, we understand. It's just your bad knowledge of history background.
FYI two atomic bombs were already destroyed two cities in Japan. You'll find that their creators were never responsible for building it, and more other, they got their money for building these bombs. If you also remember more recent history, then you'll find that creators of air-planes were never responsible for 11th September in NY. So if you'll build couple of planes and sale it to Texas we believe you won't be responsible for their drop on NY if this (god bless) will happend. Creators of M16 were never responsible for killing peoples by sharp-shooter in US, recent history too. We can continue this list as long as needed. Yes, it's bad that there are no responsibility, but it's fact.
If you want to answer, please use PM, we wouldn't reply here on this topic anymore, especially because we feel you want it to became politic by calling the names of countries, and this is definitely offtopic here, hope at least it's legal:-)

The solution could be programmed (jelsoft any thoughts?) or we can work to shut down companies like Forum Genie who are producing the tools whose only purpose is to screw up our forums

We believe that on vbulletin.org have to be good solution.
But, as the short thought. We probably would suggest open file image.php and find string
imagestring($temp, 5, 0, 2, $string, $text_color);
and replace 0 and 2 to other values, or even make it autogenerated using rand() function. In this case it'll make security text more float and probably will protect enough. Can't say exactly though, because we don't know which algorith Genie are used.

[digitalhome]

what do you want to do?

your asking vbulletin to fix it? Over on vb.org there is a hack by nail geek I belive... that lets you post in fourms but you need to answer the image text.

Ideally, if Jelsoft could stop it by programming a solution, that would be ideal.

For many of us, hacks are not the solution since we want to use the base software in order to perform easy upgrades. Don't want to make the solution anymore problematic.

My point to this thread is that if a programming solution can't be found immediately then lets put the people who create the scripts out of commission.

I see no pratical purpose other than spamming for this script so why not put pressure on them by talking to google then their ISP. (the same way we try to put spammers out of business)

[digitalhome]

I received this back from Google adsense.

Hello xxxx,

Thank you very much for bringing this issue to our attention. I have forwarded your finding on to our team of specialists for further investigation.

We appreciate you taking the time to offer us this feedback and encourage you to continue to let us know how we can improve Google AdSense. Google is always working to optimize our services. Your feedback is vital to the success of this program.

Please feel free to reply to this email if you have additional questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

xxxx
The Google AdSense Team

The reference number is #23033653. I recommend contacting them at [email protected] (where xxx is com) quoting the number #23033653 and lending support.

We shouldn't let spammers get the best of us without a little bit of fighting back!

[edogs]

Any continue of this story?