spammies

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

Next, there could be a temporal registration number limit for either greyed groups of IPs or one and the same IP (I actually don't know how it works, but I suppose if those guys could work from some crowded offices or like that...). Like 2 for a day, or 10 for a week for greyed groups, IDK.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

Or you could like to use user assistance. It can be a new type of staff - like "moderator assistant": not fully a moderator, still such a person could grey out or close threads manually, instead of implementing an automaton.

[Deleted User]

Deleted User last edited by

Block IPs would be kind of difficult because the person can disguise the IPs. Restrictions to newbies could be: after the creation of the account the person can only post in any topic however with CAPTCHA, after a number of posts (good post, not spam) the user will be able to post new threads and posts with CAPTCHA, after reach a number of threads and posts, the user will be able yo post without restrictins.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

1. Not block the IP - but "grey" the suspicious post out - to a specially dedicated area available only for moderators. And only if it's suspicious - by some criteria having been evolved by a smart subroutine.
2. Exactly I suggest a "Suspension Board" - where so "greyed out" suspicious posts can still remain organised into the same 'forums' to which they were submitted. It's like a grey [moderator] area where such posts "precipitate" getting suspicious. Like a Purgatory of sorts - fancy a "grey" copy of Earth with the same geography, but inhabitated only by bad guys and those about whom it's not yet decided.
   Moderators then could easily rehabilitate any post should it happen to have got there mistakenly (with a possible filling some report lines to improve the automaton).

[leocg]

leocg Moderator Volunteer last edited by

I have an idea: all new threads to be posted must pass through a moderation formed by users and mods or only mods!

I've laready suggested omething like that back on the My Opera times but it seens that the forum, at that time, had a considerable amount of messages by new users and moderate all of them would demand a great effort.

[sgunhouse]

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer last edited by

How about ... new messages posted by new users are only visible to members (not to search engines nor those not signed in) until a (different, not new) member has replied. This is a help forum, so old posts have to be visible to those who are not members. But less incentive to spam (since search engines can't see it) should mean less spam.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

...new messages posted by new users are only visible to members (not to search engines nor those not signed in) until a (different, not new) member has replied.

Think what you just said.
A spammer posts a reply - voila. Not even mentioning normal discussion.

[leocg]

leocg Moderator Volunteer last edited by

...new messages posted by new users are only visible to members (not to search engines nor those not signed in) until a (different, not new) member has replied.
Think what you just said.
A spammer posts a reply - voila. Not even mentioning normal discussion.

Well, a spammer wouldn't be a "not new" user.

[sgunhouse]

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer last edited by

...new messages posted by new users are only visible to members (not to search engines nor those not signed in) until a (different, not new) member has replied.

Think what you just said.
A spammer posts a reply - voila. Not even mentioning normal discussion.

Well, a spammer wouldn't be a "not new" user.

That was the idea.

Before I get there, most spam has no replies though for a few the same spammer posted 2-3 times. Under this system, the search engines couldn't see either of those.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

BULLSHIT!
You - actually - want ALL threads to be CLOSED after ONE SINGLE reply.
(I thought that was only my brain to malfunction today;)

(Don't ban me for the word, o'k?;) And I was not correct referring to a spammer. Although the idea of all threads being of max 2 comms looks, well.. You know:whistle:)

[sgunhouse]

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer last edited by

Not sure where you got that idea from - I didn't say anything about closing threads.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

You said that once replied, "new messages posted by new users" get invisible for registered users.
I agree that my brain's half-dead and I mistakenly extended that to "all threads"; but anyway, we still have all first threads made by any user (not us, of course - but those who's registered after such an implementation) actually close - for us included - after a single reply:

... new messages posted by new users are only visible to members (not to search engines nor those not signed in) until a (different, not new) member has replied.

O'k, save that if such a topic gets only newbies' replies - we with more than 2 posts do not participate at all - in such a case such a thread won't close. For us - all registered user (your words).

[sgunhouse]

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer last edited by

I said non-members and search engines can't see new posts by new members until an old member replies - though come to think of it me way want to decide they aren't spam after a certain number of days anyway - say, 3 days? The point being, we treat them as possible spam and so hide them from search engines until someone replies or a moderator is likely to have had time to look at it.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

I said non-members and search engines can't see new posts by new members until an old member replies...

Now I see.
I beg you pardon. It was neither your nor my fault - English syntax is sometimes ambiguous (the language is not an exception, though).

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

So, what about my idea of a suspending automaton and "Suspension Board"?
And what about the idea of 'user helpers' - or, in my case, assistants? We could also possibly implement user help without introducing a new staff category: a thread could get suspended, for example, if a certain number of [old] users have hit a certain button. I seem to remember a topic like "Flag in one click" - that'd be it: a "Spam!" button hit by, say, 10 users with more than 10 posts each... Nah, that's not a precise suggestion - just pondering:)

[blackbird71]

blackbird71 last edited by

There's an inherent "tension" between allowing a poster with a genuine problem/message to quickly access the forums and the need to throttle a spammer's postings. The question is how to tell the difference without making "fatal" errors either way. An ideal poster registration process would filter out a lot of spammers before they ever reached the forums, and some mostly spam-free forums indeed require a fair amount of user-identification and hand-shaking to accomplish initial registration. The tradeoff is the encumbrance of such a process for users with real problems and their need for a timely response.

With regard to posts themselves, I've observed that posters with genuine problems/comments don't cite strings of URL's (or at least more than one or two), they don't include phone numbers, and their posts don't use obfuscated spellings (frequent non-alphabetic/numerical symbols, flipping between upper/lower case letters mid-word, character substitution (eg: $=S, 0=o, etc), etc). The longer spam texts frequently are not broken into individual paragraphs, and the content/terminology of spam messages are almost always non-relevant to the topical nature of the forum in which they appear.

It seems to me that a newer poster's text, as part of his submission process, could be quickly content-scanned at the server level and "scored" using a variety of factors. If it exceeded a certain 'potential-spam' threshold, it would be diverted to a holding area for subsequent human evaluation before being posted publicly in the forums, and the user would be immediately notified on-screen that his message was being "referred for evaluation" instead of being posted. The notification would carry a link to an "appeal" address where he could send an additional message of explanation if he felt it needful. This submission filtering process could be dropped after the user's participation had become established here at "x" number of legitimate postings.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

This is insane. :awww: You don’t use Stop Forum Spam (http://www.stopforumspam.com/)?

[digmed]

digmed last edited by

This is insane. You don’t use Stop Forum Spam (http://www.stopforumspam.com/)?

Yes, we do. Doesn't seem to help that much, unfortunately.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

I like Blackbird's suggestion (which is mine as well).

[blackbird71]

blackbird71 last edited by

More as a point of information (or just curiosity), what happens when a post is "flagged" or reported as spam by a member? Does that pop up on moderator screens auto-magically or does a mod have to go to a special console page, etc? In other words, does the user flagging of spam actually contribute help, or is it irrelevant if the "ordinary" mod for a forum is off-line? Also, when flagging a post as spam, if there are several others posted by the same poster at the same time, should each post be reported separately or just one of them? I know on the old Opera forum, only a single spam in a batch from a given poster needed to be flagged, but I've been flagging all of them here.