I have noticed this past week, and more onward to come, that the spam users have came back. On my site, one known as "Grace Demspey" is one that keeps coming back, after every suspension, with a profile picture of money, and the same event. This is spam, and I tried Watchdog, and Anti Spam, and they both check out the fake user as a real user. So first off, someones knows their way around those two plugins.
Anyways before I continue, I want to let most know that Spam users are mostly a hack job. You hardly will see a case of a real person making an account to send out spam to sites for their marketing ease or because they were paid. Next, it's all to do with the dying folks that belong in the marketing industry, mainly the ones who made products or services and aren't getting ANY users or revenue. So, things like "sickmarketing" comes around. These are to be known as Spam Hosts. But trust me, market and business fails will go deeper then this.
Once upon a time, people related to a term called "Spam Harvesters." That term, well it's ways, are still used, and the top priority too. Basically a Spam harvester is when you take a pissed off guy, and he creates a script that targets certain websites and meta tags/keywords, and manipulates form data to either:
-Send a Fake Contact Message
-Make a Fake Account
-Post a fake Guestbook Entry/forum topic
-and more...way more
And now, to the part about oxwall's spam problem; when you have a growing product such as Oxwall, with 1,000's of users, these people who create Spam Harvesters know that these free CMS', open sources, create TONS of websites. But a downfall to them is their blind eyed. They don't know which one is most popular, so is best to fight for spam there, so they target The oxwall software itself, well, back in the days of 1.4 and earlier.
Spam harvesters and the creators known we have evolved, and with more Anti-Spam agent/user plugins. So now, the spam creators are not only coding their systems to get around the Oxwall software, but the PLUGINS as well.
So now, we have weak spam defenses in all of our Plugins, and we know these people who freely make them for others don't want to go through the troubles of mad customers ranting that their hard worked on system for ten bucks is bringing spam to them. But all in all, certain spam harvesters and systems such as sickmarketing, are targeting Oxwall software, knowing that their system will search OUR websites, since it is the same exact software. Or maybe, something else spans past this..?
What if, it's possible that certain things in the sites we use as Oxwall are causing the pain. Could it be the attribute link, with the plain href link to oxwall.org? Or is it in our meta with the words like openwack, and such and the harvesters know that they haven't changed them?
Not saying Oxwall has major faults, its a beautiful software, and everyone gets bugs. But, it's within the core of our Oxwall code that is causing problem. With certain keywords such as OXWALL being used, spam harvester creators can have a cake walk by targeting MILLIONS of websites because they use that.
Within content too. They know most table prefixes in our database begin with OW_ So now their spam agents can easily make content and not be suspected. It's one hell of a frightening thing.
So basically, this is to give you an overview of what I know, and what's the probable cause. You can do things like change meta tags and settings on spam plugins, but I don't think that would help you enough.
The spam harvesters know that Oxwall is being Oxwall, and that's it's main weakness..
