Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list
Moderator: Project members
- ronczap
- 500 Syntax error
- Posts: 15
- Joined: 2018-02-20 00:13
- First name: Ron
- Last name: Czapala
- Location: Kentucky
Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list
I noticed a lot of new forum members being added where the first name and last name were the same. It looked like a BOT was responsible.
I contacted Tim and he banned the IP address and deleted about 30,000 bogus members. I was manually checking the member list and found more.
I decided to automate the process, so I wrote a vbscript which creates two InternetExplorer.Application objects.
It opens the member list in one IE window (sorted in descending Date Joined sequence).
The vbscript loops thru the HTML table on the page and opens the user profile for each username in the other IE window.
It captures the first and last names and the date joined and creates a .htm file containing username where the last name matched the first.
I set a limit of five pages (50 names on a page).
I also made a YouTube video of the script running (just one page of 50 members)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcoIxdq0Ros
I contacted Tim and he banned the IP address and deleted about 30,000 bogus members. I was manually checking the member list and found more.
I decided to automate the process, so I wrote a vbscript which creates two InternetExplorer.Application objects.
It opens the member list in one IE window (sorted in descending Date Joined sequence).
The vbscript loops thru the HTML table on the page and opens the user profile for each username in the other IE window.
It captures the first and last names and the date joined and creates a .htm file containing username where the last name matched the first.
I set a limit of five pages (50 names on a page).
I also made a YouTube video of the script running (just one page of 50 members)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcoIxdq0Ros
- ronczap
- 500 Syntax error
- Posts: 15
- Joined: 2018-02-20 00:13
- First name: Ron
- Last name: Czapala
- Location: Kentucky
Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list
I tweaked the vbscript to also check the "Most active forum" to see if a member has ever visited any forum.
More bogus members are being added - here is the latest result (looking at the 200 most recent added users)
More bogus members are being added - here is the latest result (looking at the 200 most recent added users)
Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list
And there you actually replied to a spammer yourself.
Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list
Common sense. A new user, posting only in off-topic, giving unhelpful replies only vaguely connected to the topic, that's a spambot or worse.
Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list
Neither of those we want and need here. Spamming human or spamming bot, doesn't matter.
No support requests over PM! You will NOT get any reply!!!
FTP connection problems? Please read Network Configuration.
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FTP connection problems? Please read Network Configuration.
FileZilla connection test: https://filezilla-project.org/conntest.php
FileZilla Pro support: https://customerforum.fileZilla-project.org
Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list
It feels like every country with a capital >25°E with the exception of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand is inhabited solely by spammers.
- ronczap
- 500 Syntax error
- Posts: 15
- Joined: 2018-02-20 00:13
- First name: Ron
- Last name: Czapala
- Location: Kentucky
Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list
I also find it amazing how many attempts to logon to my FileZilla server I get every day.
I have added a bunch of CIDR ranges to my IP Filter.
Been using https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup to see what country/location they are coming from and https://www.ipaddressguide.com/cidr to convert the IP Range To CIDR