Spam...

Good job fellas.

I was a mod on a forum more than 15 years ago or so. At times, I hated turning on my PC because I just knew I would end up spending 2 hours clearing all the spam out.

It amazed me the lengths people would go through to post a link to whatever. We customized the site script so that it would randomly pick a word from the page and tell you to enter the 13th (or whatever) word to post. That lasted one day. Just one. SMH

That was one of many, many things we tried. Then captcha came about and that was working well when I parted ways with the site.
 


Hope the physician's appointment went well.

It went about as well as such things go.

I'm in pretty good health, I suppose.

I'm still posting by phone. It's horrible.

Anyhow, the reports and queue totalled about 500. Many of the spammers had made more than one post. Many IP addresses were shared amongst them.

I had to limit my speed to prevent false positives. I hope no innocent people were IP banned.
 
. I hope no innocent people were IP banned.
that's one of the problems with banning IP's, but it's also a calculate choice, yes a shame if any members are effected but thats life.
 
that's one of the problems with banning IP's, but it's also a calculate choice, yes a shame if any members are effected but thats life.

They can use the contact option to reach an admin if that's the case. Or, they can reset their router.

If they have a static IP address and it was among the banned they're doing something wrong.

One of the IPs I cleared had about 15 usernames associated with it. That helped speed up the process. When I smash the spam button it nukes all the content from that IP address. Anyone trying to register with those IP addresses in the future will show up in the queue and it's unlikely anybody will let them through said queue.

It's a pretty drastic step and I use it only when it's appropriate. (I've been at this for a while now.)
 
Btw does anybody have that number for contacting my airline(Delta), I forgot to write down the numbers shared here in different forum posts so I have no way of contacting them now.

@Rob , we need a Groan button for Maarten's sense of humour. If he wasn't such a good friend and a good help around here, I'd go over to that place that's below sea level and kick his butt for that.

Kudos to David G @KGIII for his efforts and likewise to Rob.

It seems the fun started about 30 minutes after I logged out last night for my evening in Australia.

Wizard
 
@Rob , we need a Groan button for Maarten's sense of humour. If he wasn't such a good friend and a good help around here, I'd go over to that place that's below sea level and kick his butt for that.
Don't be mad, I was reporting all those spam posts most of my free afternoon to help the forum staff out. Having a laugh over spammers isn't going to kill anyone, see it as laughing at the spammers now since before they were laughing at us.
 
They are back....
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It’s OK. I’m on it this morning.
I’ve got rid of about 30 posts so far and cleaned out a bunch of new signups with IPs linked to banned users, or known spammers.

I didn’t get a chance to log in at all yesterday, I had meetings all day at work.
 
I didn’t get a chance to log in at all yesterday, I had meetings all day at work.
I thought you may have still been recovering from your gig in Derbyshire
 
It’s OK. I’m on it this morning.
I’ve got rid of about 30 posts so far and cleaned out a bunch of new signups with IPs linked to banned users, or known spammers.
Thanks so much @JasKinasis!
 
Yeah, today isn't all that active - thankfully. It's nothing like what it was yesterday, again thankfully.

That was a whole lot of spam and reports. I do appreciate the reports though we had more than 100 of those. It was rather impressive, in retrospect.
 
The recent blitz is the most I've ever seen on a forum.
Kudos to all the mods for their time spent dealing with the issue.
 
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The recent blitz is the most I've ever seen on a forum.
Kudos to all the mods for their time spent dealing with the issue.

The amusing thing is that you only saw a portion of it. A lot of it was stuck in the queue, needing to be manually processed. I had to head to an appointment but the queues for approvals and reports were cleaned before I left.
 

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