Important Info! How to deal with SPAM

Planterz... check the forums around 7am, any given day, but esp Sunday. Pages upon pages of spam, all with various Chinese characters, most likely from an IP over there. Are the BF forums really for end users in China? Do you think that somehow we have a vast userbase of English literate Chinese based users? Honestly? I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'd bet against it.

It's not salting the earth if hardly any actual legitimate users are impacted. That's a red herring.
 
Cereal_killer said:
I noticed most of these spam threads are posted one minute after the last, what about increasing the time limiter between posting new threads? This could even be implemented for everyone without effecting legit user experiences as I can't imagine anyone posting separate, new, WORTHWHILE thread less than a few minutes apart.
Click to expand...

This sounds like a reasonable measure to me, assuming that the software allows it. I don't think needing to wait 5 minutes between starting threads would be all that inconvenient for most users, but it would for the spammers.
 
Banning IP's from China will likely never happen.. We do have several members from there. laizhekezhui laizhekezhui being one of the prominent ones in the CRK subforum.

We used to have some form of timeout on posting in quick succession. Remember dealing with it when I was removing spam. Seemed like it was around 60 seconds or so. Haven't seen it in awhile, but I do remember it being a pain.


I do have to thank the members that have read this and have followed through with the request. I think it has made a big difference in the number of reported posts we see in the back end.

Thank you!
 
bhyde said:
No worries- We have a number of people that spend alot of time reporting the spam and we really appreciate the efforts. Lately, @danbot , @jc57 , @hhmoore , @Dadpool , madcap_magician madcap_magician and a few others have really been doing a great job with reporting spam.
Thank you for taking the time!
Click to expand...

bhyde bhyde , are you asking us to report the top thread by a spammer's screen name, or the earliest thread?

It's funny because there are so many of them that often I hit the post time limit trying to report them.

EDIT: Also, is there a reason we couldn't do verified new user accounts for IP addresses from, um, parts of the world where spammers seem to be centered? Requiring admin account verification I think would really cut this down. Maybe limit new post creation for a certain number of posts or period of time? It would add some moderator work, but probably less than cleaning up the spam does.
 
Last edited:
madcap_magician said:
bhyde bhyde , are you asking us to report the top thread by a spammer's screen name, or the earliest thread?

It's funny because there are so many of them that often I hit the post time limit trying to report them.

EDIT: Also, is there a reason we couldn't do verified new user accounts for IP addresses from, um, parts of the world where spammers seem to be centered? Requiring admin account verification I think would really cut this down. Maybe limit new post creation for a certain number of posts or period of time? It would add some moderator work, but probably less than cleaning up the spam does.
Click to expand...

To be honest, it doesn't matter that much which thread you report- The original thought was that if people scanned for the first thread in the group of spam posts, they would easily see if someone else reported it if they followed through with posting in that thread that it was reported..Rather than reporting each and every post by the spammer.

Requiring admin approval would certainly cut down on the spam significantly..but the mods don't control the software other than use the provided tools. If that is a feature of Xenforo, then only Spark has the required privileges to enable it or add it through some software upgrade.
 
bhyde said:
To be honest, it doesn't matter that much which thread you report- The original thought was that if people scanned for the first thread in the group of spam posts, they would easily see if someone else reported it if they followed through with posting in that thread that it was reported..Rather than reporting each and every post by the spammer.

Requiring admin approval would certainly cut down on the spam significantly..but the mods don't control the software other than use the provided tools. If that is a feature of Xenforo, then only Spark has the required privileges to enable it or add it through some software upgrade.
Click to expand...

What I've been doing is just reporting a single thread by each spammer, and only if I don't see that someone else has already reported one by the same user.
 
This am I reported a bunch from the same user, read the instructions but didn't comprehend. I'll be better tomorrow am.
 
English is the 2nd language in China, some schools are bilingual education, many peoples like me know a bit of English, can do simple English reading and writing. As I known, thousands of Chinese peoples are members of BF and USN, they are legit members.

It is possible for peoples in every country to send spam, it is unwise to block a whole country because a small number of bad peoples, you can't give up eating for fear of choking.

I have an immature idea, the main language of this forum is English, the forum can run a crawler program to watching the latest non English posts and report to admins.
 
Ohhh. I just reported the same poster about 6 times yesterday. He posted 10 threads in 8 mins. I guess I didn't need to report them all.

Me no follow directions good, ask the wife.
 
I am not sure about the Mod who's who exactly. But maybe 1-2 from different timezones might help? Give a broader spectrum of availability/online times.
 
b00n said:
I am not sure about the Mod who's who exactly. But maybe 1-2 from different timezones might help? Give a broader spectrum of availability/online times.
Click to expand...

We do work in different "timezones" of free time. It's not something that we are paid to do..
For all intents and purposes, I am generally around 6:30am-4pm MST. Generally meaning that I actually have a paying job at that time and will check occasionally for reported items as time allows. Evening availability is 6pm-10pm...but around that time, @knarfeng usually starts making an appearance..
I have seen @rycen early in the mornings through the evening and pretty much the same with @Boru13
Some of the other mods come around in between these times...But none of these times are set in stone because it's all still volunteer as we have time.
We all still like to visit and read as well, so we aren't spending alot of time in the back end to see reports. There is no secret "bat signal" that lets us know when something gets reported..it relies on us constantly checking.

Mostly, this is just extraneous information to give some context to the situation and why I have requested the reporting to take place as described in the first post in this thread. When we do come on or see the reports, it helps us to get through them much faster!

Bill
 
bhyde said:
We do work in different "timezones" of free time. It's not something that we are paid to do..
For all intents and purposes, I am generally around 6:30am-4pm MST. Generally meaning that I actually have a paying job at that time and will check occasionally for reported items as time allows. Evening availability is 6pm-10pm...but around that time, @knarfeng usually starts making an appearance..
I have seen @rycen early in the mornings through the evening and pretty much the same with @Boru13
Some of the other mods come around in between these times...But none of these times are set in stone because it's all still volunteer as we have time.
We all still like to visit and read as well, so we aren't spending alot of time in the back end to see reports. There is no secret "bat signal" that lets us know when something gets reported..it relies on us constantly checking.

Mostly, this is just extraneous information to give some context to the situation and why I have requested the reporting to take place as described in the first post in this thread. When we do come on or see the reports, it helps us to get through them much faster!

Bill
Click to expand...

Yeah, I get that. I was a mod on a couple large forums myself. Since everybody works different hours and some jobs don't allow for much online surfing during work hours. If there was say a Hawaiian Mod, an Australian and a British Mod, you would have more "free time" availability covered. Since I see a lot of spam cropping out when the American Members are either at work or asleep, while it's morning/early afternoon here in Europe. It was just a thought though, reporting spam threads seems to work better since your sticky thread :thumbsup:.
 
So only one post from every spammer needs to be reported, not every spam thread? I, erm, apologize for making extra work. I thought I helped and I made it worse, as is the Derrik way!
 
I have a question about actually reporting spam when I see it.
bhyde said:
. . .
If you see the typical spam, post 1 time in the thread of "reported" or something to let everyone know that it's taken care of, and then report the thread.
. . .
Click to expand...

Where do we report these threads? Using the "Contact Us" link in the top right corner, or did I miss a thread somewhere in the tech support forum?

Thanks
 
I do the same as @wazu013, report then ignore.

bhyde bhyde
I was curious which works better for your folks end, reporting the first found thread, or reporting the member?

If it is possible to remove/move offline the users content and ban them from having their profile reported and saving you guys a few clicks, would that may be preferred?
(Still post that it is reported though)
 
Thank you to those who report and control spam. (I like spam sushi)

Thank you for the suggestion to ignore. Its quick to grab one of the spam threads, go to theyre profile and ignore. That kills your 20+ spam posts for the morning.
 
Since the Spammer tend to put a ton of links in their posts, can we limit the amount if links allowed per post?
Say 5 or so?

This should allow for the regular members to have ample linking capabilities while limiting those of the spammers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top