Attention Moderators: Spam Explosion

[arpeejay]

Over the past week or so it seems like we've had at least one (sometimes more) new spammer every day. Almost all of them have posted a variation of the same drivel (a long dense paragraph that rambles on about sports related topics) and from what I can tell several of us have immediately flagged them with the alert button for each post.

Some feedback on this problem would be useful. Are the alerts helping you? Would it be better, given the way they show up, to post a note here in general? Is there any way to prevent these things from popping up -- or are we just gonna have to live with it?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

xoxo

Richard

[fleXodus]

I usually am on here once or twice a day. And there have been times I have caught these spammers (who have created responses to existing threads) within minutes of posting. Unfortunately I don't catch every single one every single time, but I am deleting spammers as I find them. In other words, it would have been A LOT worse than it has been.

At this point, I don't know exactly what the solution will be, since these bots are circumventing the text verification mechanism which was previously used to weed out these type of accounts. I'll probably be looking into a way of adding some sort of logic-based verification question to be presented during account sign-up that could address this.

[arpeejay]

Thanks so much! All of us appreciate your hard work!

xoxo

Richard

[Lucas88]

Originally Posted by fleXodus

I usually am on here once or twice a day. And there have been times I have caught these spammers (who have created responses to existing threads) within minutes of posting. Unfortunately I don't catch every single one every single time, but I am deleting spammers as I find them. In other words, it would have been A LOT worse than it has been.

At this point, I don't know exactly what the solution will be, since these bots are circumventing the text verification mechanism which was previously used to weed out these type of accounts. I'll probably be looking into a way of adding some sort of logic-based verification question to be presented during account sign-up that could address this.

But, back to RPJ's question...are the alerts helping or are we wasting our time. I'm on-line daily and have been hitting the alert button but never have really gotten any feedback that it mattered. Could you clarify for us?

Thanks,

Lucas

[Ogun]

I think he meant that the alerts did help- that "it could have been a lot worse" if we hadn't been helping. And I hate to say it, but maybe a captcha system should be put in place?

[fleXodus]

Originally Posted by Ogun

I think he meant that the alerts did help- that "it could have been a lot worse" if we hadn't been helping. And I hate to say it, but maybe a captcha system should be put in place?

Actually, a Captcha system has been in place since the software upgrade which occurred last year (this is the actual Captcha system and not just a simple image verification). This is actually what stopped the prior spam outbreak last year. As with any spam prevention measure, I think it was a matter of time before the spam bots were engineered to outsmart this.

Reporting a post does help, but it's also dependent on when the moderators are able to visit the site to remove the posts. However, additional trusted members who are regularly active on the site have just been given the ability to ban and remove spam posts themselves, so this should help.

[Lucas88]

Originally Posted by fleXodus

Actually, a Captcha system has been in place since the software upgrade which occurred last year (this is the actual Captcha system and not just a simple image verification). This is actually what stopped the prior spam outbreak last year. As with any spam prevention measure, I think it was a matter of time before the spam bots were engineered to outsmart this.

Reporting a post does help, but it's also dependent on when the moderators are able to visit the site to remove the posts. However, additional trusted members who are regularly active on the site have just been given the ability to ban and remove spam posts themselves, so this should help.

Thanks! Good to know.