Plus EMU Spambot Problem

[LAR5]

Hey

We recently started Tux Hotel. It is going very well, and we get around 20 online every night. Unfortunately, there is 1 fun nuisance who likes to come online with a spam tool, who can send 1000's of messages in 1 second, which our emulator cannot handle, and therefore fails/gives players enormous annoyance.

We are at a loss, we have tried everything, block recapatcha, VPNs from all countries except Belgium and the Netherlands, but the spammer keeps coming back. The spammer also comes on a VPN, so banning makes no sense.

We have discovered that it is a player/staff member of Meep hotel, since we have contacts with other retro hotels, who had the same thing when they said this had not been fixed, and switched to an emulator other than Plus.

We would like to continue to use the Plus emulator, and therefore we are looking for someone who knows how to combat this spam tool, or where the fault lies in the plus emulator, hopefully, someone can help us!

Thanks!

Post automatically merged: Aug 23, 2019

PS: My discord is LK#0756

 

[Joe]

What does this “spam tool” do?

Does it make your emulator day there’s 1000’s if users online or?

 

[LAR5]

What does this “spam tool” do?

Does it make your emulator day there’s 1000’s if users online or?

Thanks for responding,

The user that is spamming in my hotel owns a spamtool that sends 1000 message's per second in a public room. Because of this, people will have lagg, and disconnect from the client.

 

[Joe]

Thanks for responding,

The user that is spamming in my hotel owns a spamtool that sends 1000 message's per second in a public room. Because of this, people will have lagg, and disconnect from the client.

I’ve never heard of this problem in Plus, can you provide a screenshot?

 

[LAR5]

I’ve never heard of this problem in Plus, can you provide a screenshot?

The spammer is not online right now, (i've closed the emulator). But it is pretty obvious. A player has a spam tool that passes through the Plus spam filter. They are a huge number of messages sent in 1 "package", usually they are silly messages without content.

They are not bots, because the owner of the spam tool always registers an account himself. We just don't understand how he has a spam tool that can get through the spam filter.

 

[Joe]

The spammer is not online right now, (i've closed the emulator). But it is pretty obvious. A player has a spam tool that passes through the Plus spam filter. They are a huge number of messages sent in 1 "package", usually they are silly messages without content.

They are not bots, because the owner of the spam tool always registers an account himself. We just don't understand how he has a spam tool that can get through the spam filter.

I would look into adding some security on registering new users and adding some filters on what they’re spamming.

It sounds like they have a lot of time on their hands to be registering and then spamming your hotel, hopefully if they hit the filter Plus will ban users after saying the same thing 8 times, either then or add a time limit on users registering per IP or add a function so new users can’t speak until they’ve done something like verify themselves of x amount of time after register.

It’s such a shame that people are doing things like this I would encourage to just keep banning them or start to look into blocking VPN’s from accessing your client.

 

[LAR5]

I would look into adding some security on registering new users and adding some filters on what they’re spamming.

It sounds like they have a lot of time on their hands to be registering and then spamming your hotel, hopefully if they hit the filter Plus will ban users after saying the same thing 8 times, either then or add a time limit on users registering per IP or add a function so new users can’t speak until they’ve done something like verify themselves of x amount of time after register.

It’s such a shame that people are doing things like this I would encourage to just keep banning them or start to look into blocking VPN’s from accessing your client.

It is indeed a great pity and sadness that people spend time manually registering accounts and then spamming in my hotel. I think it's a shame to see that people put so much effort into ruining the effort and pleasure of others.

Furthermore, we are currently looking for a solution, verification could be a good solution, but it is a shame that it should because I think it should not, but unfortunately.

You also indicated that it would be possible to set a maximum registration per IP. We have this, only this spammer uses a VPN, which makes it through.

We had set up a better ReCaptcha as the first solution and blocked VPNs in all countries except the Netherlands and Belgium. (Since our hotel is for those 2 countries). But in vain, the spammer also got through it.

I just can't put my mind to it that people put so much effort into ruining someone else's pleasure. I think it is a great shame for the hotel, the players, and the community, because the "retro" community in the Netherlands and Belgium is no longer so good, and that there is someone who is ruining it so much. Quite a shame.

Thank you very much for your help, we will see what we can do with your tips!

 

[Joe]

It is indeed a great pity and sadness that people spend time manually registering accounts and then spamming in my hotel. I think it's a shame to see that people put so much effort into ruining the effort and pleasure of others.

Furthermore, we are currently looking for a solution, verification could be a good solution, but it is a shame that it should because I think it should not, but unfortunately.

You also indicated that it would be possible to set a maximum registration per IP. We have this, only this spammer uses a VPN, which makes it through.

We had set up a better ReCaptcha as the first solution and blocked VPNs in all countries except the Netherlands and Belgium. (Since our hotel is for those 2 countries). But in vain, the spammer also got through it.

I just can't put my mind to it that people put so much effort into ruining someone else's pleasure. I think it is a great shame for the hotel, the players, and the community, because the "retro" community in the Netherlands and Belgium is no longer so good, and that there is someone who is ruining it so much. Quite a shame.

Thank you very much for your help, we will see what we can do with your tips!

They’ll eventually get bored if you keep banning them, add what they’re saying to your word
filters so Plus will ban them if they continue.

It’s a matter or how fast your staff can ban and how long they’ll keep it up.

I wouldn’t back down buddy, don’t let them take over you!

 

[lincoln67]

They are a huge number of messages sent in 1 "package", usually they are silly messages without content.

What do you mean 1 package? Do they send one enormous packet that crashes the emulator? Or are they separate packets? I'm curious and would like to help you fix this.

 

[LAR5]

What do you mean 1 package? Do they send one enormous packet that crashes the emulator? Or are they separate packets? I'm curious and would like to help you fix this.

Hey, thank you for helping us, that means a lot to us and our community.

See it this way:
A user comes online, (not a robot) and sends a huge amount of spam messages in a short time, causing people to fail/crash their client.

I dare not say for sure that it is 1 package or that there are several, the only thing I know is that it is a huge amount of messages sent through a spam tool, and that causes all players to get stuck and eventually crash.

 

[Joe]

Hey, thank you for helping us, that means a lot to us and our community.

See it this way:
A user comes online, (not a robot) and sends a huge amount of spam messages in a short time, causing people to fail/crash their client.

I dare not say for sure that it is 1 package or that there are several, the only thing I know is that it is a huge amount of messages sent through a spam tool, and that causes all players to get stuck and eventually crash.

Doesn’t the user get caught by the Plus spam filter and has to wait x amount of seconds though?

Not sure how this would crash/fail the client.

 

[lincoln67]

Are you sure that they are crashing your emulator through chat messages? I'm pretty sure they are using some other method. I've seen retros get flooded with tcp connections when they don't set connection limit per IP in the emulator config. By any chance is the emulator online count increased during the attack?

 

[Pinkman]

Really the only solution I see in this is coding a spam system Just like Fresh did a while back.

 

[Hypothesis]

This sounds to me like he's flooding your emulator port with connections, probably by directly hitting your server IP plus your emulator port, for example, 30000. You can fix this by setting a limit per IP in your config.ini.

 

[Joe]

This sounds to me like he's flooding your emulator port with connections, probably by directly hitting your server IP plus your emulator port, for example, 30000. You can fix this by setting a limit per IP in your config.ini.

This wouldn’t really help much as soon as this limit is hit nobody can login to the client.

The limit doesn’t check per IP in Plus I’m pretty sure?

 

[Hypothesis]

This wouldn’t really help much as soon as this limit is hit nobody can login to the client.

The limit doesn’t check per IP in Plus I’m pretty sure?

Huh? game.tcp.conperip doesn't limit the amount of people who can login to the client. If that's the case, my hotel shouldn't be able to reach past 5, because that's what I have it set at.

 

[Joe]

Huh? game.tcp.conperip doesn't limit the amount of people who can login to the client. If that's the case, my hotel shouldn't be able to reach past 5, because that's what I have it set at.

Ah maybe I'm thinking of an old version of Plus. Yeah this should work then, unless the port is being flooded.

 

[Muscab]

Really the only solution I see in this is coding a spam system Just like Fresh did a while back.

we also had email verification in place before whispering, pming / invites. spam bots banned people for 59mins for repeating same phrases.

id ask the starter of this thread to seek a tcp proxy and limit his connections to something modest his hotel wouldnt peak.

 

[Sledmore]

Huh? game.tcp.conperip doesn't limit the amount of people who can login to the client. If that's the case, my hotel shouldn't be able to reach past 5, because that's what I have it set at.

Ah maybe I'm thinking of an old version of Plus. Yeah this should work then, unless the port is being flooded.

It'd be 5 connections per the IP address. So I could only load up 5 times via my IP address. I believe it should work in the released Plus. I put this in place on Habboon initially to lower down the amount of connections (as we had no ping checker, so the user count would stay high), eventually we added a ping checker to drop the dead connections.

It doesn't mean 5 connections in total - just per ip (game.tcp.conperip - game > tcp > connections PER ip)

 

[Joe]

It'd be 5 connections per the IP address. So I could only load up 5 times via my IP address. I believe it should work in the released Plus. I put this in place on Habboon initially to lower down the amount of connections (as we had no ping checker, so the user count would stay high), eventually we added a ping checker to drop the dead connections.

It doesn't mean 5 connections in total - just per ip (game.tcp.conperip - game > tcp > connections PER ip)

I think I got confused with an older version as I remember having some issues with that, would this work just as good using proxies? Not sure what I had a problem with, maybe everybody was connecting through the proxy IP which caused a problem.