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The past couple of days has seen a flood of new spambot accounts. Maybe the procedure for opening an account can be modified to attenuate this. If not, I suspect the flood will continue, because it's easy for the spammers to keep pounding the site once they've automated it.
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Something like
a.) Captcha
b.) Src IP check?
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I dislike Captcha, and apparently so do the site hamsters, though it might be reasonable while creating and verifying an account.
Source IP address is even worse. Competent spammers use a VPN, which makes it impossible to distinguish them from legitimate users.
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I'm no expert in this, so I didn't suggest a solution. If forced to answer, it'd be Captcha. 
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Every time I've looked at the first page of QA over the past couple of weeks, a certain set of questions posted between 2010 and 2018 are always at the top - seemingly all related to URLs and redirections.
For example, at the moment, on the first page of 20 questions, only six were posted within the last year:
There's never any indication of what dragged them back to the top of the list. I suspect they're being actively targeted by a spam-bot, which isn't actually managing to get past the moderation filter.
If we can't have the questions drop back to their old position when a spam answer is deleted, and we can't prevent them from jumping to the top when a moderated spam answer is posted, is it perhaps worth "locking" these threads once they've been targeted multiple times?
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Yep, we're seeing it too. I've added a task our end to help try and keep things sensible by resetting the "last active" date after spam has been removed.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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XColorSpectrumCtrl - a non-MFC color picker control that displays a color spectrum [^]
The download is flagged by Kaspersky (and possibly another AV) as containing a Trojan that wasn't detected until 3 years after the article was written = so it's probably a false positive, but can you look and remove the XColorSpecturmCtrlTest.EXE file from it?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Sophos is also flagging it as infected.
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May be legit detection then - but a trojan that escapes detection for three years but gets into a professional developer's EXE download? It's a bit too unlikely for my taste, but deleting the offending file is the best solution, just to be sure.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Checked this again on another machine using Avast AV and it reckons its OK.
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Paloalto Cortex XDR does let it through. Btw. XColorSpectrumCtrlTest.exe is dated on 2008.
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And the trojan was detected in 2011 according to Kaspersky.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Update:
Finally I try to run the app (and not only scan it by Cortex) and that is the result:
Application information:
Application name: XColorSpectrumCtrlTest Application
Application version: 1.1.0.1
Process ID: 3296
Application location: C:\Users\....\XColorSpectrumCtrlTest.exe
Command line: "C:\Users\....\XColorSpectrumCtrlTest.exe"
File origin: Hard drive on this computer
Prevention information:
Prevention date: Sonntag, 15. Mai 2022
Prevention time: 15:37:49
OS version: 10.0.19043.2.0.0.256.1
Component: WildFire
Cortex XDR code: c0400055
Prevention description: Suspicious executable detected
Additional information 1: C:\Users\....\XColorSpectrumCtrlTest.exe
Additional information 2: E6DA91998D5F224CC333A06D8E3EC59AB0F48501E16D5DCE696389D0B2C33C5C
Additional information 3: E6DA91998D5F224CC333A06D8E3EC59AB0F48501E16D5DCE696389D0B2C33C5C
Additional information 4:
[Edit]
I did not submit that until now to Paoloalto, maybe I will do it one time.
Anyway Cortex gives similar alarms with my own software when I do very low level access to USB devices.
I see it relaxed at the moment.
[Edit1]
After several logins to Paloalto they do not release it.... 
modified 15-May-22 11:28am.
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All I can suggest, other than not using Kaspersky, is to submit it as a false positive to the anti-virus maker and wait. Their algorithms for matching malicious code are (understandably) weighted on false positives rather than false negatives.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Quote: I am trying to download the source code of this article in your site "XML File to SQL Database
XML File to SQL Database[^]
I got an error message can anyone help me in this
Quote: This is what I got when I CLICK download:
Ticket:
Error: An error occurred in this page. The error has been recorded and the site administrator informed.
Abort, Retry, Fail?_
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On the article webpage click on the "Browse Code" and find the .zip then right-click and "save-as". This should work. I think it worked for me at some point.
[EDIT]
Check that, the downloaded .zip is invalid ...
[/EDIT]
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I added a tag to one of the questions so that it could easily be found. It resulted in a v4 version. But when I look at the changelog it attributes my edit to another member (The original poster).
Just wanted to mention it here in case it's a bug.
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Which Question?
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
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It was this question[^]. When you click on v4 it attributes the edit to the author.
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Yeah, this looks like a bug. I'll look into it.
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
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Actually you created a V5, which isn't publicly available yet. Not sure why, but will check with others to see what should be happening here.
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
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How do I edit a question I need to add something
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Navigate to your question and click on "Improve question" in the bottom right-hand corner. It's on the same line as your username, just above the first answer. You may need to mouse over that area for it to appear.
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