spammies
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blackbird71 last edited byThere'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.
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A Former User last edited by
This is insane. :awww: You don’t use Stop Forum Spam (http://www.stopforumspam.com/)?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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! -
A Former User last edited by
Maybe some useful tips in this post: http://www.stopforumspam.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3235
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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.
Which means no. :down:
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A Former User last edited by
I have a suggestion.
Why don't we set a new, dedicated forum for the Black Megic here? :idea: -
blackbird71 last edited by
I can't help wondering... is somebody with an axe to grind targeting Opera forums specifically? The baba spams are almost identical, they often come in giant batches so as to splatter the whole forum page (at least 30 in a short time in the Windows forum today, 11 in this forum, yet none in some other ones), and appear to emanate from the same source. Other forums' spam I've seen over the years typically ranges 'all over the map' in terms of subject matter, timing, etc.
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Deleted User last edited by
That's a lovely racist statement, joshl. You might want to reconsider.
I think we're seeing the "tip of the iceberg" so to speak in terms of WHY the older Opera community was finally shut down. We had heard for months that the SPAMMING in the blogs and the forum was almost beyond their ability to stop and of course, eventually they simply decided to shut it down. Haavard had a suggestion for requiring two-step authentication before one could register for their forums but it was shot down as being too inconvenient. Something obviously has to be done before this forum too becomes irreparable.
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Deleted User last edited by
Prohibit the use of symbols (=, +, %, &, @. They used in spams) on the title to nominate topics can decrease spam
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