Damn Spam posts!

bigmoose

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This post deleted when I blew up my scuttling charges... about a day and a half too early. Content is unrecoverable... but you can infer my intention!
 
It appears that we get about a dozen spams a day.

Some of the other forums (or groups) have a certain rule that prevent a newly registered member from making his/her posts globally visible. The first 10 or so posts will only be visible to the administrators. If the post appears to be legitimate then the admins make it available to the public. Although this appears to be additional work for the admins, it's usually not. The spammers are discouraged and don't return.

If that feature is available may be it's time to turn it on.
 
Tha'ts one among several things that have been discussed; I'd be up for it being that way.

BTW, it's often much more than a dozen a day; when I'm on I nuke a bunch of them as they get posted. Sometiems I catch a spammer before he posts more than the first one, preventing even more. But usually it's after they're there, and most poeple don't seem to be on at this time (1-4am AZ time), so they don't see them. :)

Miles nukes some too, as do others, before they're seen, I think.


There are also spammer lists that can be automated into PHPBB to either blacklist those particular members that attempt to register a specific username from a specific IP, or with a specific email address, etc. But someone would have to write the scripts to do that, and I gather it isn't trivial.

Same thing for using those spammer lists to automate diverting users into the "must be approved" list, so that not everyone has to go thru that process, just the suspect ones. Could reduce the inconvenience to legitimate noobs. :)



Another thing that would help is a "honeypot" forum. There are certain types of keywords that tend to attract spambots, so they either automatically post in certain threads or forums, or auto-quote certain posts that contain those keywords. The honeypot forum contains spam-triggering posts, topics, and forum headings, as well as all the other spam posts. It's possible to create scripts that autoban (and delete or hide posts from) those types of spambots. Also, it would autoban anyone posting in those forums, because any human (that reads the languages the warnings are in) would know better, as there would be a giant header on them saying "DON'T POST HERE OR YOU'LL BE BANNED" or some such thing. ;)

Spam posts in this case probably would never be deleted, but rather quarantined in that place as bait for the other spammers. YOu might have noticed that sometimes multiple spammers hit the same thread with different spams, and it just seems to keep happening to that specific thread? That's partly how the honeypot thing works.

Though the classic honeypot forum is usually totally empty except for the warning not to post there or be autodeleted/banned. :)
 
Can't thank you all enough for working so hard cleaning it up. I start early, and usually wake up to a pretty clean forum.
 
Look at my forum http://voltev.com/forum/ I set it up to notify me when anyone posted. Now the software seems to have given up. Soon I will have 100,000 posts all spam.

If I ever decide to start selling electric vehicles at http://voltev.com/ I am wondering if those 1000's of ramdom spam links will help or hurt my ranking in the search engines? Think I should go into the server and delete my whole stupid forum.
 
I am wondering if we should boycott A123RC.com, with the daily dose of spammers they are sending our way (and presumably all over other forums around the web). I lost track of how many I've nuked so far, but I think it's more than any other single spammer source since I started browsing ES. :(

At the least, perhaps as a group we should make an official complaint to them about it. Yes, I am aware that they probably are not doing the spamming directly, but rather are paying spammers to spread links to them around the internet (a common practice, apparently). I am also aware that a complaint will likely do no good at all--it will at least make them aware of the problem.

Especially if each and every member of the forum were to do so individually. ;) But before anyone does so, let's talk about it.
 
They must be quite the idiots. Couldn't they just post thier ad in the for sale section if they wanted to? After all, they aren't selling fashion jewelry or some such.
 
I just really have to wonder if they have enough viable inventory to be able to support such mass marketing.
 
Well, a few people have been buying merchandise that is, quite frankly - crap.

Maybe they need to up the quality, I think there are very few people left here that would consider it.

Possibly a sticky on the battery technology section with a caveat emptor for anyone considering a123rc.com as a source, with an unbiased collection of threads with both positive and negative experiences?
 
Can't we do anything about these spam posts? They are getting worse and worse. This morning I saw 10 spams and one genuine post at the top of the active list. Very frustrating. What is going on here lately?
 
itchynackers said:
Can't we do anything about these spam posts? They are getting worse and worse. This morning I saw 10 spams and one genuine post at the top of the active list. Very frustrating. What is going on here lately?
Come on, now. You can't just go calling dogman's posts "spam." Sometimes he has good information in there.

Cameron

(Absolutely no offense/criticism intended, dogman. I just noticed that you had a lot of recent posts. I do click on them every chance I can, I haven't come across any advice you have given yet that has not been top drawer.)
 
Believe me they bother us too!... Just thinking out loud, perhaps we should change the question on setting up a new account to "The name for AJ's "favorite" motor is:" xxxxx

That way if you read the board a bit before you would know it. Perhaps give an email account to request it through if you can't guess it. Like write a 50/100 word reason why you want to join. Provide name, date of birth and social security number if in the US! :mrgreen: ... and three bank account numbers for reference... :twisted:

If you have an implementation idea to limit the spam, add it below. BTW the spammers are 99% new registrants with less than 5 posts.
 
Does it really help if/when we report or does that only cause you more work?
 
I appreciate your guys efforts I am sure it's not easy. Those spammers are a pita I have had to deal with them first hand
at work with their smtp spam. Watermarking or email authentication & maybe some new challenge questions sounds good
here.

Still keep up the good work. I just don't get who they expect to buy their bs crap.
 
I got surprised the first time i saw a post showing how to enlarge penis, after that i think i have seen spam every day.
How can we report it ypedal?
 
I would auto-remove links if the user has less than 25(?) posts and auto-flag it for the mods/admins. You could provide a button, in place of the link(s), so that well-intentioned newbs could PM a mod to try and get their links re-instated.

Of course then someone would write the spam bot that posts 26 times within a small time frame so that they can sneak that one link in before their account (1 of ????) is nuked. :roll:
 
I'll be honest, I had to try for 3 days to signup for the forums. Each time I was getting locked out because the captcha was more complicated than I could get. I have no idea why I struggled so much.


There needs to be more proliferation of different types of captchas. This thread made me think that they could harness the absurd number of flash games that exist, and make it such that you have to beat the level on an easy flash game in order to get in. The diversity of games would reduce the incentive to create bots that could solve them. Just a small barrier to botz. There are so many types of things computers are bad at- like depth perception, that I wonder why there cant be more captcha systems. I know its important to keep in mind some people might not be able to access visual-captchas, but there are ways around that.


MEhhhhhhhhhh.
 
what i would like to have is a moderator-intercept for all new members.

either:

--first xx number of posts must be approved by a moderator before they show up to the general membership

or

--no member can post at all until a moderator "validates" them. optionally such validation would require them to type up why they are joining es.

either one would let us screen out spammers before they get to post anything. i'd rather have the latter than the former.

it might also be nice to ahve some sort of a post filter that refuses to accept any post submitted with certain keywords or phrases, and notifies moderators that such a post was submitted along with the contents of the attempted post, and a ban ip&username&email button that would do all three at once. that way we could prevent a lot of spam from even being posted at all, with little mderator intervention and time wasted, other than to ban the attempted spammer if it was indeed spam.


it looks like the link ypedal posted above for spam hammer
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=2127067
would do a fair bit of what i want, evne if not exactly the way i would do it.


i'd also love to see some plugin for phpbb or firefox that when clicked on can automatically gather from the moderator panel the membername and ip of suspect posts, and check the spammer databases for them, reporting the results to the moderator as a list, so we wouldn't ahve to do them all one at a time.

right now i periodically go thru the first two pages of new members in the members list page, and check the ones that have spammer signs against this link:

which itself compares to a number of databases. then i use the results to decide if they are or are not a spammer. if they are, i ban them before tehy get the chance to send the account info off ot their spambots, and post stuff i'd just ahve to delete anyway. if they don't show up as a known spammer yet, i put a link to their profile in my es spam suspects folder and periodically check them all again.

some spammers wait for *months* before they use an account to spam us, and a couple have waited over a year. some of them even post what appear to be normal stuff, but later come back and replace it with spam or insert links or a signature link to their spam.

most of the ones that post normal stuff have copypasted it from somewhere else on the web, so i can do a search on google for a phrase match, and find that whenever google is actually operating correctly and they're not experimenting with it again. then i can ban the spammers and nuke their stuff, sometimes before they even get to turn it into spam links.
 
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