spammies

[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.

[leocg]

leocg Moderator Volunteer 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?

Don't know abou the other mods but i never got any kind of warning (popup, email, whatever) about flagged posts.

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?

One is enough.

[sgunhouse]

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer last edited by

We will ban spammers outright, which includes every post they ever made. (The last update changed the description on the button for this option, it now reads "Obliterate user".)

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

For SMF there is Stop Spammer (http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1547). Maybe something similar is available for this forum.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

Maybe this is useful:

“Yep, the CAPCHAs seem to be useless any more as far as stopping the bots.
I have started just using a question/answer verification and that seems to stop the bots almost completely.
And then, if a bot slips through and gets verified, new members have to go through verify for their first 3 posts on the board which stops a bot. Then if for some reason they get by that and can post their spam link, all members who post a link in their first 10 posts have that link automatically scrambled.
I know, its overkill, but I figure a layered approach works best, and so far, especially since I put my board back up after it being taken down by a spammer, its working. So far. Nothing stops them forever.”

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

It's a primarily technical support forum, and I believe there are happen desperate people, we have glitches, making 1 post, maybe never again/soon...

Who's for the "pending board"/holding area?
Aye!