All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XIII

[Bob Schroeck]

So, over the weekend we got a bunch of strange posts from Russian spammers, and in dealing with them last night, I thought it might be useful to share just how I found out that they were Russian spammers. Well, there's a site called Stopforumspam.com which maintains a publicly-accessible database of spammers and their IPs. To check an IP, just go to a URL like this one:

https://www.stopforumspam.com/ipcheck/31.184.238.185

Replace the IP at the end with the one you want to check, of course. If any spam has come from that IP (and been reported), you'll get a page on what that IP has been up to. (Oh, and that IP is one of the ones I just banned, in case you're curious.)

I should note that the nine IPs I banned yesterday each had no less than 7000 reports each -- and some were over 9000!. And they've been at it for weeks or even months. I should also note that the IPs only varied by the last triplet -- they were all 31.184.238.*. We're not looking at someone spoofing or borrowing an IP -- we're looking at a dedicated spam operation in the Russian Federation that is not likely to go away soon. I suspect that as soon as those 1-week bans I gave are up, they'll be back, and I'm very seriously considering turning them indefinite (as I've done to other confirmed spammer IPs) to avoid having to go through this all over again. (And I need to go research to see if we can ban 31.184.238.* instead of the individual IPs...)

Anyway, I just wanted to share this tool with the other admins.