SOLUTION TO SPAM?

[arqestevez1]

Hello everybody.
lately there's been an unusual increase of spam on the forums, the critic part is that there are always the same names, the ones who post porn and all those things.
i am a teacher and i recomend my students to be part of the forum, and also there's people who work and open the site in their offices, or for example, i have reported spam several times while i'm at the university, and i complained because sites like this were not allowed in the net, so now it is allowed and we have this issue.
is there anything we can do to get rid of all this porn messages?
like for example, couldn't we confirm somehow that we're still using our accounts? in order to delete every user who is not a human...
maybe like a confirmation account email, or a super basic question, like, wich version are we using, or... wich is the first rollout in the vray options, according to the version that we're using...

[skurl]

Re: SOLUTION TO SPAM?

i wouldn't want anyone to get bared from using this site and making posts like i see where some site ask you to have regitered product liscenses so you can post, but i think there must be someway to stop these spam messages from comming up, its abit annoying, sometimes its jibberish,next its porn and pills, there needs to be some stop to these people, things were going great for sometime but now its crazy on here, i hope some solution can be found to this spamming.

[arqestevez1]

Re: SOLUTION TO SPAM?

Spam in this topic is a freakin insult...

[Skif]

Re: SOLUTION TO SPAM?

I guess simple but annoying fix would be captcha ...

[thomthom]

Re: SOLUTION TO SPAM?

We've had problems at SCF with high increase in spam the last months. We've been trying lots of various methods to fend them off, but they quickly get through it.
The the moment, the only thing that stops it from the public is having posts by new members being approved first. Though this takes it toll on the moderators that has to constantly go through all the new messages.

[40th]

Re: SOLUTION TO SPAM?

We've had problems at SCF with high increase in spam the last months. We've been trying lots of various methods to fend them off, but they quickly get through it.
The the moment, the only thing that stops it from the public is having posts by new members being approved first. Though this takes it toll on the moderators that has to constantly go through all the new messages.

The forum is flooded with spams and ads. I think the idea of approving posts of newbies is very good. And so it won't be a burden on the moderators imho posts of users with less than 5 posts should be approved.

[LeoBonilla]

Re: SOLUTION TO SPAM?

I like much more the security system in the T-Splines Forum and the method used in the ChaosGroup forum, people should have valid license to get support in some topics in the forum.

[andybot_cg]

Re: SOLUTION TO SPAM?

My 2cents - I have to agree with thomthom. In my limited experience (I have a wordpress blog) it would be an undue burden for the moderators to have to filter out all the spam comments before posting (I ended up turning off comments.) It would discourage/ be off-putting to new people from posting since there would typically be a backlog of comments for the moderators to go through, so it would be a delay before people can post. That said, if there was some warning up front that comments are moderated and you can expect a delay, it may be an okay compromise for real people.
Also, from what I've been reading lately in security blogs is that a lot of spam posting is generated by actual people who are being paid fractions of pennies to go around captchas and whatnot. Hard to stop that.

I'd have to say though, my personal preference, like Omar, is that I'd rather not see the porn/ ciales ads in the first place. I'd rather fewer people get through than see that junk. However, I just want to be sensitive to the experience of new users, since we all were once.

[thomthom]

Re: SOLUTION TO SPAM?

The thing is - I'm not sure if it's more work to approve the first few posts of new members as oppose to hunt down and clean out posted spam. The benefit is that the spam never htis the public and only the moderators needs to be bothered with the occasionally dodgy content. (still no fun for me who drop by the forum while at work....)

[thomthom]

Re: SOLUTION TO SPAM?

Saying that - I don't think we've gotten any complaints at SCF for having the pre-approving system of new members.

[-Keith]

Re: SOLUTION TO SPAM?

Hello All,

We do have a captcha in place for new users signing up.

Judging as someone who has been deleting all this spam every day its not coming from the same user accounts at all. I ban them every time, usually by IP then delete their account. We actually have a 0 tolerance policy.

It is a real problem and we are looking at quite a few options for the best way to deal with it.

[andybot_cg]

Re: SOLUTION TO SPAM?

be aware that this is the kind of spam you may be dealing with, so captchas don't necessarily do much:
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/11/c...n-and-machine/

Hello All,

We do have a captcha in place for new users signing up.

Judging as someone who has been deleting all this spam every day its not coming from the same user accounts at all. I ban them every time, usually by IP then delete their account. We actually have a 0 tolerance policy.

It is a real problem and we are looking at quite a few options for the best way to deal with it.

[dkendig]

Re: SOLUTION TO SPAM?

Just installed a new captcha that is a little tricker than the typical captcha. Maybe it'll help ::crosses fingers::

We aren't going to make it so new posts have to be approved or anything of that sort, so this captcha is pretty much as far as we're going to take this.