stopping spam
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bushwalk.com admin commented on how they stop spam
wayno wrote:
Hi
i notice this site doesnt seem to get automated spam messages getting through,
is anyone able to advise what they use to control the spam please?
i am a member of tramper.co.nz and they are having problems getting on top of automated spam
We get a HUGE amount of attempted spam here. We manage it via several strategies, some automated, and some manual. Here's what we have:
•During registration, the form includes a simple random question/answer that is configurable. The questions are simple for a real human (eg, "what is the main colour on this web page?"), but difficult for an automated spam bot. This, alone, has gotten rid of 100% of automated spam bots.
•A custom modification to the registration script that looks up the email address and IP address in the stopforumspam.com database. If both are found in the database, then the registration is denied. Denied registrations are logged at http://bushwalk.com/spam.txt (where you can see we block about 10 per day).
•New users must have at least one post approved manually by a moderator, before their posts appear in topics automatically. This catches many more spammers, but it is often difficult to tell, and we get a few false positives as well as a few false negatives. We also check the IP address and signature of many of the first-posts, it is very unusual to get spam from an Australian IP address, and spammers often have a signature linking to another site.
Can I pass this on to the owner of another group I belong to please?
Im an admin on that site and along with the other admin and moderators have to deal with 3 or 4 spammers a day
it was given freely , so go for it,
please submit your credit card ha ha ha ha ha
The biggest problem with span now seems to be as comments to photos, huts, articles, etc. On some pages it is getting ridiculous, and will only get worse as there is no way of deleting it at present. One example is:
http://www.tramper.co.nz/?1733
Though I've come across many more.
Matthew: we need that magic flag to mark comments as spam on other pages, as well as on forums.
I agree with the above post. The spamming of the comments sections is becoming a problem & detracting from the value of the site. Another example is the "Links" tab where most of the comments are spam. Being able to flag the comments would be a help but adopting measures suggested in the first post on this thread sound even better.
Would flagging the article, photo, place etc. thread that the spammers have commented on be of use to you Matthew to identify which comments need deleting?
Hi Matthew. I've got some silly spam in the comment field of my post on the Stour circuit. Any way of getting rid of this? http://www.tramper.co.nz/?7948
I see you got rid of all the spambot comments on the Adelaide Tarn - Lonely Lake high route. Thanks.
There have been dozens of pages spammed in the comments box in the last few days - and they are just the one's I've got in my watchlist. The tidyup is going to be immense if we don't get the tools to stop this soon.
Matthew - I know you're busy but the sooner we get a means of flagging (removing) comments on articals the less work there will be to tidy up the mess they're leaving.
Not that it's ideal, but when the time's finally found it might not take so long to clean up the mess simply by eyeballing the accounts created since a certain date, looking at stuff they've posted (anywhere), and then just culling the account and everything associated with it if it looks to be a spam account.
Being able to red-flag accounts with this sort of effect could be helpful in future, though there'd need to be a way to dissuade people from abusing it.
Matthew is doing the best he can but in my opinion this website needs one or two Moderators who are online more often then he is and who can help out be deleting this crap, then messaging Matthew the details of the spammers for him to ban them.
Deleting the spam helps and his automated system is doing a reasonable job but I agree a moderator or 2 would speed the process up. I have offered to help in the past and my offer still stands.
Banning by user name and email address does not work at all. You will notice that the spam will come in a block of 4 or 5 from one user then that user is never seen again The next lot comes from a different user (same user different id) This user is a machine not a person and can create hundreds of accounts a minute in both free email and any forum it finds. Banning by ip sort of works but not that well Quite often all you see is the ip of a proxy server which could have hundreds of addresses but also it could be a virused pc that is being used as a relay. There are millions of these pcs. Banning these could block real posters although Im sure all real posters take proper steps to keep there pcs off the zombie list. On my other forum I ended up blocking a whole subnet in Bangalore due to one persistent spammer Stopped that one but did it really drop the amount of spam in that forum. Maybe by a quarter to a third No more than that. Only thing that works is live moderators willing to use the delete button.
1 deleted post from
rose10170914
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| Forum | This website |
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| Started by | waynowski |
| On | 24 January 2012 |
| Replies | 15 |
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