The forum spam situation
Original post
Well as you may note, people are still happily creating new accounts to post one message in the forum before being blocked and having their message deleted.
The approach I am working on is to allow all users to flag any post. When you flag a post, it will disappear for you immediately. When it receives enough votes, it will be hidden for everybody. Longer term members will get bigger votes than newer members, so that content can be removed quickly without havoc breaking out.
This is not a cure, but it should be quite effective. Once in place, it will be hard to see what the motivation could be to continue bothering to spam.
28 comments
Matthew is Honors's suggestion possible...........anything to stop this rubbish......it's getting out of hand....!
I know you're looking into it but they're taking over the forum big time.....unfortunately....!
Matthew I understand you are very busy & working on the spam problem but it has reached the stage where the level of it is detracting from a great site. Even as a temporary measure extra moderators as per 'geeves' suggestion may be worth a try. Perhaps the perpetrators as soon as they see their efforts getting limited or no exposure will desist.
The word recognition thing or anything that cuts the current spam levels would be good.
Guys we may have to put up with this for a while so just sit back and enjoy the links. Not all of them will get you in trouble or break your pc.
We all know Mathew is liveing away from home in CHCH or whats left of it. This wont be the top of his priority list and Im sure he will get back to it when he can.
Things could be a lot worse than a little spam
I agree that this is perhaps far from the top priority for Matthew and we all understand that its a very difficult time for him, we are all also aware that he will do his best for the site, he always does, however this doesn't mean that we should just ignore it either. The least we can do is report it, as requested by Matthew himself.
As a matter of interest, why do you have nothing on your profile? It's a question I have asked many times in this forum as I think its something that we should all make the effort to do as it makes it more personal when we're speaking to each other. Just my opinion.
Sorry have updated now.
I agree we shouldnt just ignore it but at the moment there is little else we can do so there is no point stressing about it
It looks like the spammers have realised noone is removing there "art"
My offer of moderating and deleting spam and spammers still stands if its possible to do this even if its only temporary until you can get back to some sense of normality down there.
If you would rather pick someone you already know and trust then I have no problem with that but 3/4 of the posts in the last 24 hours are spam.
Im sure that there are more people than just me willing to help out
Hi geeves. I don't think spammers really care about whether spam gets removed or moderated -- I can tell this by the sheer amount of spam that gets aimed at my blog and never sees the light of day because the spam-catching system blocks it. Any email sysadmin will have similar stories. Once a spammer's managed to automate the scripts for posting crap somewhere, it may as well be zero effort for them. This site will likely be one of thousands that a particular spammer's system tries to post to with any given bit of spam.
True but in the short term deleting it and banning the ip addresses that send it means the rest of the forum stays intact and usable.
This has worked on the other forum I moderate that uses a similar registration set up to here. I did however find myself having to ban a whole block of 200000 ip addresses in Mumbai to beat one spammer. That forum now gets less than one spam a month.
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| Started by | matthew |
| On | 16 February 2011 |
| Replies | 27 |
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