Visitors

[Condobloke]

These don't seem hard to identify. If people post a company URL for anything other than technology related websites, I'd call it spam....

I totally agree.

Surely Linux.org isn't going to become an advertising hoarding for totally unrelated topics.

It would appear, by the growing profusion of such rubbish, that @Rob is somehow missing the occurrences......perhaps blissfully unaware?

That doesn't auger well for the continued success of this site.

One has to wonder just how many of the 'members' who are dropping url's for various businesses on this site and then never appearing again to take part in this site's stated purpose....are in fact 'sleepers'....those who simply lay in wait for the opportunity to take part in a ddos attack which brings this site to its knees.

For example:

....these...on the 15th and 13th of this month.....

These outages are growing....they can be shrugged off, as they usually are ......but they will be ignored at our peril.

 

[KGIII]

unless one of the mods spam-cleans them)

Done.

So, how can we resolve this? I don't have a ton of time. It's no longer the pandemic, of course.

What I do have time for is to process a list like that - I think. Another mod/admin might jump in to lessen the load.

 

[wizardfromoz]

Done.

Lol, David beat me to it, and thanks, Stan, for the list.

Morning all.

 

[atanere]

So, how can we resolve this? I don't have a ton of time. It's no longer the pandemic, of course.

What I do have time for is to process a list like that - I think. Another mod/admin might jump in to lessen the load.

As I said before, playing whack-a-mole with these spammers is a poor method. It's too much time and effort for mods or concerned users to spend, and it's not fun. As much as possible, everyone should be here to have fun and to learn (or teach).

IMO, the answer is for these URL's to be put in the moderation queue so y'all can delete the spammers in just a few seconds of your time. I hope that is not a hard task for @Rob or XenForo, but we'll have to wait for Rob to check back in to tell us. Or maybe one of the other ideas I mentioned earlier. Maybe there are many ways to fix this, I don't know. I'm just trying to clearly point out that it is a problem that seems to be getting worse.

 

[KGIII]

I hope that is not a hard task for @Rob or XenForo, but we'll have to wait for Rob to check back in to tell us.

It has been a while but, sadly, I have gone through the XenForo admin control panel (you can do this by setting up a trial on their site), and it doesn't appear to have any features that'd control this.

Hmm...

At the same time, I think it's possible to disable the 'about' pages. I could see doing that. Do we really need that? Are the 'about' pages valuable to anyone besides spammers? Just participate and we'll know what you're about.

 

[atanere]

At the same time, I think it's possible to disable the 'about' pages. I could see doing that. Do we really need that? Are the 'about' pages valuable to anyone besides spammers?

I think that would work... but wait, there's more.

What about Signatures?

Would not the spammers simply switch from posting links in the Homepage to posting them in a Signature? The critical question is, again... "Can the URL's be held for moderation?"

Far more people use the Signature feature than the Homepage. Is there a willingness to forfeit that too if the URL's cannot be held by XenForo?

I don't like suggesting that users lose these features, but I can't see how to contain the spam other than with the ideas proposed so far. The database query/purge script idea gains more traction to not disturb other user's usage habits, but I don't know if it is a viable solution, or if @Rob would take it up. I've read that some XenForo forums block IP addresses from entire countries (yes, you know which ones)... is that the only answer? As a worldwide forum, I don't like that idea either.

Also, let me please apologize to @noelw for hijacking this thread. I think I may have deviated too much off topic. If the mods would like to carve it up to start a new thread, please do.

 

[Rob]

@atanere I do remember something along the lines of needing 'x' points before being able to add a URL to your profile and you just reminded me of it. I'll look into that again.

 

[MikeWalsh]

We always seem to get a lot of new users who join and then never post anything. Perhaps they’ve joined and are inactive because they don’t have any questions at the moment. Maybe they’ve recently switched to Linux or are thinking about switching and have signed up here in case they do need to ask questions.

Yep. I'll agree with that. And then - as you say:-

But as we’ve seen, some of those inactive accounts are spammers biding their time until they decide to post spam. But how do we know which users are which?
Until they start posting, we simply don’t know.

I had one over on the Puppy Forums just this morning. Joined in February '21.....nearly 3½ yrs ago. Not a peep out of 'em. Then this morning; up they pop - out of nowhere - posting porn site spam links....

They're gone now.....but until this morning, we had no idea they were going to do that. If I hadn't caught it, one of the other mods would have done; even phpBB has a basic reporting system.

But, yeah; you DO develop a kind of "sixth sense" about a lot of this stuff as time goes by.....though some of 'em come up with such weird & wonderful ways of spamming you with links that it's a constant learning process. We've had some real crazy stuff over at BleepingComputer; I have never seen such a collection of ingenious oddities in my life; "invisible" links, links on a full stop, links in an apparent 'space' - links that don't even SHOW as links (they're the ones that have made me scratch my head more than once!)

It's a case of "us vs. them". You do what you can.....and sometimes - like during the early days of the pandemic - there's just too much TO handle.....and - at least in the short term - it CAN 'get away' from you. A team of 10 of us at BC simply couldn't keep up with the tsunami of spam that hit us from the middle of March 2020 onward. If Lawrence Abrams - the site's owner - 'Grinler' on the forum - hadn't whipped-up some special scripts on-the-fly, we'd never have gotten on top of things..!

That was about the time I joined the staff at BC. Talk about a "baptism of fire"...


Mike.