|
|
| phaeron |
| Posted: Sep 6 2011, 02:21 AM |
 |
|
Virtualdub Developer
Group: Administrator
Posts: 7773
Member No.: 61
Joined: 30-July 02
|
As you probably know, manual spamming on this forum has been an increasing problem and I and the mods have had to clean it out by hand. I just spent the last couple of hours mass-cleaning spam users out of the forum, mainly profile signature/website spammers. About 18,000 accounts were nuked as a result, a few questionable profiles edited, and a couple of class B IP ranges banned. Most of it was automatic with filtering on zero posts and the rest were manually checked, but if by chance your account was nuked, sorry about that and just re-register.
To clarify the policy on this board, it is not appropriate to use your profile or posts to advertise unrelated commercial websites or products that are unrelated to video work or VirtualDub. This includes, but is not limited to: shoes, health supplements, WoW gold, vasectomies, loans, credit cards, beachfront property, phone call scams, air conditioning, vacations, coupons, weight loss plans, carpet cleaning, cat food, real estate, "search optimization", immigration help, or any of the other garbage I just had to clean out.
Needless to say, having to deal with this makes me cranky, and I'd entertain suggestions on how to deal with this better. Relying on me and the mods (mainly the mods) to deal with this is a waste of the mods' time, and CAPTCHAs won't work as these are from manually registered accounts. I am thinking of embedding a forum key generator into VirtualDub itself so that in order to register on the board you have to actually know what VirtualDub is and have run it once. This will be inconvenient for a few external people trying to report problems, but in the worst case they can email me directly.
|
|
| evropej |
| Posted: Sep 6 2011, 05:56 PM |
|
|
Advanced Member
Group: Members
Posts: 514
Member No.: 26523
Joined: 28-November 09
|
I volunteer as site admin to delete spam messages.  |
|
| Loadus |
| Posted: Sep 8 2011, 09:18 PM |
|
|
Advanced Member
Group: Members
Posts: 352
Member No.: 10881
Joined: 1-July 04
|
| QUOTE (phaeron @ Sep 5 2011, 08:21 PM) | | ... I am thinking of embedding a forum key generator into VirtualDub itself so that in order to register on the board you have to actually know what VirtualDub is and have run it once. |
This actually sounds very interesting. But then again, as the accounts were manually created, they can also manually register, maybe ...
How about: first post would have to be approved by a moderator? How many new posts from new users do we get each week?
If the spammers only create the accounts and leave the bots to handle them, maybe an image recognition question would filter them out? (But if they manually log in that won't work either)
--------------------
deviantART behance |
|
| -vdub- |
| Posted: Sep 8 2011, 09:55 PM |
|
|
Advanced Member
Group: Members
Posts: 613
Member No.: 27087
Joined: 24-February 10
|
Suggestion deleted as could be used for other purposes that would not be of any benefit. Would eventually be used for more than a spam guard against all internet users. The reason why no reliable forum spam guard solution has been found so far ? |
|
| evropej |
| Posted: Sep 9 2011, 01:22 PM |
|
|
Advanced Member
Group: Members
Posts: 514
Member No.: 26523
Joined: 28-November 09
|
Spam spotted in General Discussion.
We can come up with great ideas to block spammers but I dont think the volume right dictates a change.
I see once or twice a week where a spammer will blurb on the forums in mass.
These can easily be deleted by a site admin.
I used to do this for about ten years on another forum.
There is nothing like a human being overseeing things. |
|
| -vdub- |
| Posted: Sep 10 2011, 01:08 AM |
|
|
Advanced Member
Group: Members
Posts: 613
Member No.: 27087
Joined: 24-February 10
|
Really don't see the point to have a new mod to do this. The forum has had a good clean and is healthy, an easy task i guess to keep on top of things. As long as we report SPAM for each user spamming the forum as per normal.
Manually delete spam is the way it is done now. Better for all forums on the net when found a solution that is automatic and intelligent to deal with this we wait. |
|
| freedomdwarf |
| Posted: Sep 11 2011, 11:21 AM |
|
|
Advanced Member
Group: Members
Posts: 119
Member No.: 30166
Joined: 7-March 11
|
We would be waiting forever. lol.
As fast as people invent ways to spot the Spam automatically the spammers find ways around it.
And as Phaeron has stated earlier, these aren't bots - these are stupid humans that sign up then spam the forums, usually en-mass because they know they will be deleted quickly.
Anything automatic can only weed out certain words or phrases and sometimes in error and there are always ways around that.
Evropej is right, there is nothing like a human to spot Spam. We can see where someone has been clever or deliberately mis-spelled something to get around the usual guards against spammers.
No disrespect to all those nice people on here who's first language isn't English, but whoever is given the job needs to have English as their native tongue as sometimes the nuances of the English language can sometimes be missed when evaluating potentially flaming posts.
I don't know if there is an add-on out there but the idea that a certain number of unique 'Report Spam' button clicks (3? 5?) would automatically remove the post and make a list of the user-names that caused the spam to be posted and if more than 3 separate spam posts made it into the list, that user-name would automatically be banned and its IP address?
That way we could all report spam as and when we found it and when the threshold number of clicks has been reached (by different users) it would automatically be removed. The 3-strikes-and-your-out rule would automatically ban them too - or should we make that just once-and-your-out?
The only way back would be to have someone (Phaeron only?) manually remove them from the block/ban list.
Anything missed by this sort of semi-automatic system would definitely need a human to look at and evaluate but I don't see many of these getting through.
It would also avoid having a Mod waste a lot of time trawling through the posts to find spam and remove them.
Anyone good at writing plug-in scripts??
--------------------
Sometimes, intelligence means the obvious flies over your head! |
|
