[Typo3-typo3org] Unwanted mail

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hello everyone,

[This mail is going to Stanislas Rolland with Cc to typo3.org-team]

Stanislas Rolland wrote:
> Please be aware that I am receiving unwanted emails from address
> www at www1.t3o.punkt.de (ip address 217.29.33.146) which appears to be a
> sub-domain of yours.

> I would appreciate if you could stop the issuance of those messages.

www1.t3o.punkt.de is one of the machines serving the typo3.org website.
The unwanted messages that Stanislas (and the other extension authors)
receives are caused by the so-called "Blog-Spammer". This person employes
a small army of virus infected PCs that surf the web and whenever they find
a feedback form send in the "spam of the day". As these feedback-forms
nowadays often are directly published in blogs this person has been named
the "Blog-Spammer". In the case of typo3.org the feedback forms are the
ones in the Extension Repository.
While surfing the net, the spambots send a "References" Header pointing
to one of the spammers websites. This enables us to block most of the
spambots from surfing typo3.org for most of the time. But as the spammers
websites are usually killed after a few days, he changes his websites
quite often and after a change it takes a while for me to spot his new
websites, so after a change he is always unblocked for a few hours.
Unfortunately, the spammer stores addresses of feedback-forms for a while,
and in his POST-Requests there is no Referral to his spamsites, so these
can not be blocked in the same way.

So, what can we do to stop this abuse of the extension feedback form?
The usual way would be to add a challenge to the feedback form, like
text from a graphics field that has to be typed in or a simple equation
that the user has to solve or something like that. Do we have an extension
that provides this functionality or would someone be willing to write one?
Any other ideas what could be done?

Regards,
Wolfgang Zenker
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