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[news]

It's been a pretty eventful week. We're still experiencing issues with notification delivery. Please know that we're working very hard to resolve this matter involving a third party. We'll keep you posted right here.

Frank's weekly giveaway
When we last joined Frank and Meme, an unidentified flying object was spiraling down in front of them. A

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Oh dear. Spamhaus is srs bzns.

Looking at the listing there, it seems to be that it's spammers hosting their warez on LJ, rather than other forms of bad behavior (like spammers spoofing email claiming to come from livejournal.com, or people reporting news post notifications as spam rather than retrieving/resetting their account info and unsubscribing). So if that is correct, then LJ would want to track down the spammers who have set up little nests on LJ, and root them out and destroy them.

Some of the spammers that are on LJ don't serial-add, don't spam communities, and don't comment, they just sit around in their own journals making spammy posts (and apparently emailing people to point them to those spammy posts). There are a lot of them.

As a user, I can't take action directly against them. But I can report spam in my own journal and in my comms. I can hang out on the Latest Posts page (http://www.livejournal.com/stats/latest.bml) and use the Report a Bot form (in the contextual hover menu, or at http://www.livejournal.com/abuse/bots.bml) to get more of the bots reported to the Abuse Prevention Team.

I don't know how many hours the team has had to devote to spamwhacking, but I know I can spare five or ten minutes to report some of the bots on that page. The more we report, accurately, the more they can zap. The more we report, the more information on the bots (the IP addresses they use, the email addresses, the email domains, the other patterns) they have to analyze.

I've spent nearly ten years on LJ, through all sorts of ups and downs. Spamhaus blacklisting LJ means it's serious. I want to keep LJ around. I can spare five or ten minutes reporting bots. Who's with me?

[astragali]

That's great, if LJ acts on the reports they receive. The Spamhaus listing strongly implies they do not.

[azurelunatic]

I've seen spammers get whacked. I used to volunteer here, though not in spamwhackery, and I know they do.

What I know about the system, from various talk and the code as it's installed elsewhere, is that offenders with a lot of reports get handled first. Sadly, this implies that spammers with few reports are going to sit around for a while; I don't know how long. I don't know how soon Spamhaus prefers to have stuff handled; I don't know how many hours of labor LJ has to devote to whacking spammers; I don't know how many are likely to go unreported or slip through the cracks. I don't think my speculation is likely to serve any useful purpose.

I care about LJ, and it kills me to see it being left to the spammers.

[astragali]

I sure haven't, and I work at another large anti spam service. In fact, they don't even accept reports from our service and users, and they haven't since 2009.

[azurelunatic]

Oh, ack, that's rough. :(

[xlerb]

Looking at the listing there, it seems to be that it's spammers hosting their warez on LJ, rather than other forms of bad behavior

they just sit around in their own journals making spammy posts (and apparently emailing people to point them to those spammy posts).

Since I don't think anyone has linked to the detailed spam report in this thread, I will do so. I think it makes it unambiguously clear that the situation is as you describe.

[azurelunatic]

Ah, thank you for that link, I had not poked far enough to see that.

[astragali]

The spammers run botnets. They infect workstations and then use those infected machines to send spam, often pharma spam. They have to have a place to direct their marks, so they also use the botnet to create web sites on LJ.

[heirdom]

I found (and reported) some journals earlier that had been created in early January and had racked up 20,000+ posts. One I saw had an hour-old journal on its 32nd entry. It's ridiculous.