How to keep the forums clean

Erratus

Erratus

There are good daemons around, who are doing a really good job i.e. on formatting and moving posts. :)

As more and more identical first posts of "new members" can been seen, who open new accounts just to fill all our subforums with their arts of marketing, I think we might discuss if posts should be scanned by bogofilter or alike in order to keep the forums clean.
 
i already suggested to make something like voting system with N users needed to delete message. each deleted by this method post to be copied for final approval to mods.
other option is to just limit new users to just one post in first 24 hours so one spammer wont flood the forums.once a day mods will receive summary of posts for approval. however this will delay legitimate posts. perhaps one can enforce one registration per ip address for one hour. and/or no more than N new user registrations per block. i doubt that 100 NAT users will rush at the same time to register here.
but this is open to "sleepers". in 30 day frame one register each day one user in one hour. in the end of that time one will have ton of legitimate users thus drowning this place.
options as much as you want. but which is better.
 
Voting might generate more problems than spam does.

Restricting new accounts is good practise on many forums.

My idea is putting dubious posts on hold for review/erasure by moderators.
But what criteria makes a post dubious? Besides good results of spam filters
I'd regard postings as dubious when they are 95% identical to a previous posting of the same member.

Well, I think moderators already have ideas about what would make their life more easy. I started this thread just to encourage them to go ahead.
 
is there spam filter for forums? it would be nice to have one here. mostly the spam i see here is for сvv so putting that in bad word list will be beneficial.
 
ok nice. this is for 3rd time in 24h. this is made by regular visitor of this forum. we discuss how to stop this and in return you get piles of this specific type of spam
 
I propose that rules be reviewed and toughened. A spammer subscribed today and was able to post mailto links in 10 spam posts. How is that possible? Aren't new members required to have at least 10 posts AND be members for 10 days before being able to do certain things (such as posting links and editing posts) or are mailto not considered links?
 
mk said:
he make 10 posts, get the credential to post link and edit his previous posts.
Click to expand...
I don't understand how it's possible.
The rules clearly say that a "user has to have posted at least 10 approved messages AND 10 days of registered membership."
The spammer registered today (18th) I checked it.
 
Make every new member register twice, force a period of 2 hours minimum between first registration and the second. On the second registration ask a unique piece of information provided at the first registration, something that can't be just copy pasted.
 
I'm mod at a few forums and we use the following

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=177704 - great mod, it to set permissions based on user’s post count for posting urls, email id and much more. I say set it to 20-30. This will get rid of many bots and so called stupid SEOs.

Turn on akismet protection in vb which will get rid of many spam bots who puts too much stuff.

Use reverse proxy to filter out junk and throttle connections per second using pf. If any ip try to make too many connection use pf to block them for 24-48 hours.

There are other settings in VB cp like time between two post should be 5 mintues for all new users.

All users with 100 post or good reputation can be promoted to good users group. You can skip good users from these limitations.

HTH
 
We've added several new filters (word lists, external content checks). BTW, the spam you do get to see is about 1% of what is attempted. Most spammers never even make it to their first post because their signup information is automatically checked against several databases of known spammers by a script I wrote for that specific purpose. That kills about 80-90%. The other ~10-20% gets dropped in the moderator queue. A tiny portion slips through for you to see. Since there's virtually no spam here, it looks like a huge deal, but it really isn't ;)
 
Yeah, the spam is relatively low here. I don't explicitly distrust the 1% figure given above, but based on the 5-20 spams that I see here a month*, well, I'm shocked that the attempts are so low.


*extrapolate that to the actual number of hours in a month, assume a normal distribution of spam/time (probably not valid, I'll bet most of it comes at 9-5 UTC+8 IYKWIMAITYD) that would put between say 40 and 200 spam messages/month which would mean a mere 20,000 attempts a month on the high end. That just sounds a bit low, like an order of magnitude low.
 
Most attempts don't even make it to the forums anymore. The signup checks kill hundreds of accounts a month, the moderation queue has better triggers (and a few dozen were added just now), and a lot of IP addresses and networks are already blacklisted.
 
Aren't DHCP addresses recycled? Wouldn't this cause another person not associated with the previous owner's actions to be banned because of that?
Can't a spammer/cracker/skiddie et al move their location and cause other's adresses to be blocked by piggybacking on unsecured or weakly protected wireless networks?
It's possible for the $SPAMMER to use any random name and change the methods by which he or she does the spamming, is this ever taken into consideration?

What prevents MIM between the site and the first external point located by traceroute?
 
I have a long history of professional RBL blacklisting. I know what I'm doing. There's always a combination of factors behind a blacklisting.
 
Compare to Google forums / mailing list / groups spam is under control here ;) I stopped visiting comp.unix.* because of spam. Google should have done a better job. Also, my ISP stopped news servers service last year :(
 
It always amazes me how bent out of shape people get over single-digits of spam postings in a month (or single-digit spam e-mail in a week). Really? 5 spam postings in a month is something to get worked up over? Really?

Ok, some spam gets through all our automated filters, and sometimes forum members have to report the messages as we don't see them instantaneously, but I've yet to see a spam post last more than a few hours on here. Are you really going to complain about that?

Really?

Sometimes, I'm tempted to turn off all spam filtering on our e-mail server at work so that people can get a better understanding of just how much spam they aren't getting (over 3 million blocked per month). Maybe then they'd stop complaining about <10 messages/week that squeaks through.

Maybe we should turn off the spam filters on the forums so that everyone can understand just how good they have it? ;)
 
phoenix said:
It always amazes me how bent out of shape people get over single-digits of spam postings in a month (or single-digit spam e-mail in a week). Really? 5 spam postings in a month is something to get worked up over? Really?
Click to expand...
Agreed. On my personal email account I get about 50 spam mails a day. And I don't even use that account that often.

I don't mind reporting the occasional one that slips through, it's usually deleted within the hour. I think the spam handling here is top notch. :beer
 
phoenix said:
It always amazes me how bent out of shape people get over single-digits of spam postings in a month (or single-digit spam e-mail in a week). Really? 5 spam postings in a month is something to get worked up over? Really?
Click to expand...

There's a helplessness people feel when some sociopath abuses something they care about and there's nothing to do but watch. A "flag as abuse" option helps that feeling, even if the threshold is high.

If abuse here increases, or the admins feel spam removal is taking too much of their time, I think adding such an option would help. Like with email, you can't use just one filtering scheme, but multiple methods can complement each other.
 
There is a law of diminishing returns at work here. We don't want valid posts ending up in mod queues for the sake of catching one more spammer than we already do.
 
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