The Groups section is drowning under an inundation of spam.

  • Thread starter Cyber-Berserker
  • Start date


Wow! The spam is getting worse. I see some illegal links to copyrighted movies :eek:.

@ryanvade I think you need a digital machine gun to remove all this spam . I feel so sorry for you :p. Actually not ;).
 
One must almost admire the tenacity of those d**n spammers.:(
 
I spend more time removing spam then reading the forums..
 
Oh dear! They have graduated from groups to main board. Perhaps closing down the groups section was a mistake. It forced them into the open.:p
 
Yes, the groups section was probably the first port of call and now that it's gone...

Spam blocklists won't help much. You will need to recruit a few more staff to help with the clean up. Just getting a few spam hunters on the pay roll should help to keep it to a minimum.
 
I understand that.

The first step to tackling any forum spam is by having active bodies cleaning up the mess - clearly that is not the case here. Relying on blocklists and/or captcha alone is not a realistic option (obviously).
 
Unfortunately, I do not have the privileges to remove it myself.
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I feel a bit sad when I read something like this. At the beginning and end of the day it is about TRUST. The message here is "Devyn cannot be fully trusted".

I was a moderator of 4 sites, now just 3 (...disabled guy, too much time on his hands...). The first closed its Forum when spam became too much. The second and third let me delete user and posts. The fourth lets me move posts to "Spam" out of public view, to be deleted by others later.

It is no good having Spam Hunters who are all based in e.g. the US. Time-zones matter. If the spam comes from, say, India they are several hours ahead of the US - even before the US wakes up. The spam needs to be found and removed promptly and not left lying around.
 
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Yes, the time zone thing is important.

I think it's fair to say that there are currently two active staff members. According to their profiles, both were last seen on Saturday.
 
We were getting spammed so bad at my LUG forum that we now require admin approval before an account can be activated.

Since December 1st, we've blocked and banned nearly 50 spammers and we're only half way through the month.

We check their IP address against the SFS database. But as a general rule, we only accept members from inside the US.
 
@Rob What do you think about this?


arochester said:
I feel a bit sad when I read something like this. At the beginning and end of the day it is about TRUST. The message here is "Devyn cannot be fully trusted".

I was a moderator of 4 sites, now just 3 (...disabled guy, too much time on his hands...). The first closed its Forum when spam became too much. The second and third let me delete user and posts. The fourth lets me move posts to "Spam" out of public view, to be deleted by others later.

It is no good having Spam Hunters who are all based in e.g. the US. Time-zones matter. If the spam comes from, say, India they are several hours ahead of the US - even before the US wakes up. The spam needs to be found and removed promptly and not left lying around.
Click to expand...
 
arochester said:
I feel a bit sad when I read something like this. At the beginning and end of the day it is about TRUST. The message here is "Devyn cannot be fully trusted".
Click to expand...
Perhaps "Devyn cannot be fully trusted"? ;)

If we take the UF as an example - staff over there went power mad, were extremely heavy handed, biased, etc... this was mostly because UF recruited a lot of suck ups and yes men - en masse to repeat and enforce canonical ltd policies - the welfare of the users came secondary. They literally just gave teenagers ban hammers and said "now go forth and smite those infidels who doubt the word of the most holy shuttlecraft"... I haven't been there for years, but people tell me that not much has changed - or it's worse...

I'm not saying that "Devyn cannot be fully trusted", but I can see why the admin are careful about who they recruit.

But I digress - just give some of the long term members (including Devyn) "spam fighting powers"* and the forum can start to get back to some semblance of normality. At the moment people are arriving here, seeing pages of spam and are probably heading elsewhere...

* A "recycler" forum where they can move spam posts to and the power to temp ban spammers for review by moderators/admin.
 
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