sick of spammers?

[alcattle]

I brought this up before and everyone said they could live with spamming. Seems it is worse of late, like 1/2 the new messages are spam. I am getting to recognize "new users" and ignore most ot it. It is getting out of hand in your opinion?

[Khatovar]

It goes through cycles. For a long time we'll barely see any spam, then all of a sudden it'll be like 90% of new posts are spam.

[MiRai]

I am unsure what a thread like this will accomplish besides people either stating they see the spam, or they don't. The
new wave of spam could have something to do with this (http://www.allspammedup.com/2010/01/google-recaptcha-cracked/), then again, it may not. However, I will say that there is a good
amount of spam on these forums that goes unreported during the day [U.S.]. People are quoting the spam, laughing at it,
and completely failing to report it at all. I only know this because I now make it a point to quickly browse through every
single new post there is manually searching for spam since some people find it hard to click the report button. Remember,
we're not getting paid to do this and the mods cannot be in all the threads at the same time. Unfortunately, 90% of the
mods are sleeping when the rest of the U.S. is asleep, and I can tell you that most of the spam comes from non-U.S. IP
addresses [big surprise?].

As for you night owl people from the U.S. and the early morning EU crew, you're doing a fantabulous job at reporting things
that sneak in at night [my night]; so, virtual high five to all of you.

In the end all I can say is... hang tight, and after Svpernova09 [I'M CALLIN' YOU OUT BRAH] is done working his regular 9 - 5
job, we'll force him back into the lab so he can whip up some new and innovative ways to block the bad guys.

[Siaea]

Well, I work a regular 9-6 at the moment, and I've got d-b.com always open on one of my tabs. I'd be willing to step up for deleting/banning during the day if Svper wants help. I do usually report when I see it, though.

[Svpernova09]

I have to agree with everything said so far. Yes there is a big influx of spam lately, no this isn't the first time and unfortunately no, this won't be the last. The risk you run when you have an open / user automated site is that anyone with a valid email address can sign up and post. Add that to the fact you have a pretty popular website to the mix and you're just begging for spammers. Open forum registrations are a necessary evil of open communities. Any forum community that tells you they don't have a spam problem is either lying to you, not allowing open registrations, or they're getting virtually no traffic.

We use multiple methods to try to prevent / catch spam varying from registration captchas to some other various tricks I keep up my sleeve. The entire goal in using these tools is to not prevent a real, *human* being from registering on the forums and being able to ask "WTF IS A MAKRO?!oneoneone". As soon as we do that we cut off our user base, and we cut off what makes this site run...people. The difficulty here is that most of the spammers are either using really badass bots or they're actually using human people to register the accounts and then days (sometimes weeks) later the account comes back and informs us all why we need larger penis' and the latest purses as discount rates.

So really, in order for us to remain open and not make new users jump through *too* many hoops (we already have them jump through a couple (http://www.dual-boxing.com/announcement.php?f=11)) the easiest solution for us is to keep doing what we've been doing in encouraging members to report posts. When you report a thread or a post, it goes to it's very own special forum that only the forum mods and I can see. (yes we actually have forum mods again, they just wish to remain rather incognito, but you've likely seen them around.) I only actually read through the entire site about once or twice a day. But I visit much more than that, and my first stop every visit is the reported post forum to see if anything needs to be done.

This probably isn't the answer people want to hear, but at the same time, give some credit to our other forum mods. For every 1 spammer I ban, they ban 3-4 others. We also have a mod that regularly checks new users for spam signatures / profiles and bans them before you even see them. I can't thank these people enough for what they do, on the budget they do it on.

[MiRai]

We use multiple methods to try to prevent / catch spam varying from registration captchas to some other various tricks I keep up my sleeve.
Feral cats don't wear clothes.

[Svpernova09]

Feral cats don't wear clothes.

True.


On another note. Both of the other active forum mods and myself are in IRC 24/7. You can hop in IRC here (http://www.dual-boxing.com/webchat.php) type in my name as it is in IRC so it highlights me, and link me the thread. If I don't get to it first, one of the others will.

[ElectronDF]

I REALLY don't like Captchas, but I would like an email that hey have to respond to. Not sure if that will slow them down, but seems way less intrusive than a Captcha. I actually don't mind the spam, I know it will get taken care of. I report it if I see it. I just feel bad that someone wants to make trouble for people, more than what they do to make trouble. Congrats on 3000 posts exatly, Svpernova.

[Svpernova09]

I REALLY don't like Captchas, but I would like an email that hey have to respond to. Not sure if that will slow them down, but seems way less intrusive than a Captcha. I actually don't mind the spam, I know it will get taken care of. I report it if I see it. I just feel bad that someone wants to make trouble for people, more than what they do to make trouble. Congrats on 3000 posts exatly, Svpernova.


lol I noticed the 3k after I posted that. We currently do make them verify an email now, captchas actually do stop quite a bit of spam. But just like any other method, it can be defeated.

[Khatovar]

Well, I'm usually here lurking the overnights {about 11PM-9AM Eastern} . If you guys need someone else, I would gladly step up to purge the nighttime spam since I'm usually here all night reporting it anyway.

[Kicksome]

It would be nice it you could make it so we can report more than 1 spam a minute. Usually they are in batches, and it's really easy to just report, report, report. But we have to wait 60 seconds between spam reports.

[Svpernova09]

It would be nice it you could make it so we can report more than 1 spam a minute. Usually they are in batches, and it's really easy to just report, report, report. But we have to wait 60 seconds between spam reports.

With how we delete spam / ban users we don't need to know about every single post they make. We only need to make sure at least one of their posts is reported.

[zenga]

I think there is little more that you guys could do to prevent the spamming. Captchas are what they are, they weed out a good amount of scripts. But anyone who googles 2 minutes can find cheap sweatshops that will manually enter large amounts of captchas. Basically all it takes is making a fairly simple client that does the registration, sends the image to a sweatshop, wait for the poor fella that manually enters it (what a job) and then registers. Given the fact that most of the boards run on standard software (phpbb, vbulletin, ...) and share a similar registration process, they can use this 'en masse'.

A board can come up with some measures (like x post count before you can post links or pictures), but this will also have an impact on the genuine users. It will just weed out another amount of spammers. The persistent ones will work around though.

The spammers are not so much after people on those boards who want a bigger willy, but having their link and various keywords on a bunch of websites increases their ranking with the various search engines. Which is the real problem.

As long as the mods want to put an effort in deleting the spam and go through the daily trouble to do so (thanks for that btw), it's only a minor annoyance for me. I click 'new posts' and can see in a glance which topics i want to read and which ones I want to avoid.

[Kicksome]

I think everyone is doing a good job at keeping out the spam. People make their livings spamming forums like this, so some will get through, and it will get deleted. Not a big deal.

It would suck to lock it down so much that new users don't feel welcome, or make it harder for people to post, seems fine the way it is.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Is it possible to give a few more of us a mod-like ability to (at least temporarily) delete/hide these spam postings? I'd be happy to do that when I found 'em if it would help. I'm probably not a regular enough visitor to warrant mod privileges but having the option to put a post/thread into the "temporarily deleted/hidden while the mods review for offensive/banned content" state would probably be a nice feature.

[Ualaa]

Even if it required a few different people to report the post to have it hidden, that could work.

[Svpernova09]

Is it possible to give a few more of us a mod-like ability to (at least temporarily) delete/hide these spam postings? I'd be happy to do that when I found 'em if it would help. I'm probably not a regular enough visitor to warrant mod privileges but having the option to put a post/thread into the "temporarily deleted/hidden while the mods review for offensive/banned content" state would probably be a nice feature.


Even if it required a few different people to report the post to have it hidden, that could work.


I've thought about both of these scenario's before. The one Ualaa mentioned, I've actually done some test coding on, but nothing that comes close to what could go into production.

[alcattle]

For the most part, the trash is gone in 12 hours. I do not know how Google cache works on something that gets deleted. Seems like they will get found by the slime who look and we have to live with the way we run the forum as it does incourage new members to ask for help. I will just know that ghost posts are rarely brought back to life by the normal posters

[HPAVC]

I would never know if it wasn't for the RSS feed having them in it.

Sadly there just isn't a way to redact or make constant a sequence of postings in atom/rss. So reposts show as a duplicate and a delete shows as an orphan sadly.