This is getting absolutely ridiculous. Five pages of chinese crap in the general knife discussion area, more in the sword discussion, and gadgets and gear areas, and who knows how much else. Isn't there some way of prohibiting these folks from getting on here and polluting everything?
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Spammers swarming the forums
- Thread starter Charlie_K
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Gotta love the Ignore button though.
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Does anyone know what it says?
i'm wondering if this attack is some sort of retribution aimed at bladeforums for allowing joke posts that are easily construed as slanderous such as this one: https://www.bladeforums.com/threads...el-lock-failure-it-cut-off-my-finger.1054277/
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You do realize that post is not only 5 years old..Right?
I'm sure it has absolutely nothing to do with the spambots hitting the forums.
Report the threads, we will take care of them.
Yeah, five years old, long time for a slanderous post to survive on a supposedly responsible forum, but whatever. I just wonder had the thread lasted so long if the company in the title was an overpriced knife maker like Chris Reeves or similar. Almost time for my membership renewal, looks like i'll be ten bucks richer this year...
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I've been trying, but I'm afraid to click on some of this crap.
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Dogpile another $20.
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That particular brand takes plenty of licks on this forum..Don't kid yourself.
Your attendance is your prerogative in whatever capacity you deem necessary.
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I made that thread on April 1st 5 years ago. It would take incredible fools to think that the thread was actually slanderous. One day I hope that people would read entire threads before jumping to such conclusions.
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Speaking of slanderous...
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If you use Google Chrome, you can right-click anywhere on a page and choose "Translate to English" (or whatever your primary language is) and it will do best-effort in-place translation. You don't have to click on any links.
For those complaining, it turns out to be quite hard to stop actual human spammers, without also impacting normal users. A person creates throwaway e-mail accounts, uses those to create forum accounts, logs in, and then turns on their post-bot software that starts spamming up the place. Anyone doing this for a profit has ways of getting around IP bans, and unless you block all anonymous e-mail hosting domains that provide free e-mail accounts for anyone who wants to sign up, there's no way to ban accounts from known domains.
The only real thing you can do is to quickly delete the spam before it gets indexed by Google, etc. If you stamp it out as fast as they create it, you become a lower-priority target, though any forum with a lot of traffic is going to be a target.
The exact same spam posts are scattered all over the Internet. If you do a Google search on some of the spam thread titles, you'll find plenty of other sites with the exact same message on it.
The only real way to block it would be to put the forum behind a paywall. Even a $1 a year membership would probably kill it, but then it might also reduce the number of people who participate at all, given the large number of posters who don't even pay for a Basic membership.
For those complaining, it turns out to be quite hard to stop actual human spammers, without also impacting normal users. A person creates throwaway e-mail accounts, uses those to create forum accounts, logs in, and then turns on their post-bot software that starts spamming up the place. Anyone doing this for a profit has ways of getting around IP bans, and unless you block all anonymous e-mail hosting domains that provide free e-mail accounts for anyone who wants to sign up, there's no way to ban accounts from known domains.
The only real thing you can do is to quickly delete the spam before it gets indexed by Google, etc. If you stamp it out as fast as they create it, you become a lower-priority target, though any forum with a lot of traffic is going to be a target.
The exact same spam posts are scattered all over the Internet. If you do a Google search on some of the spam thread titles, you'll find plenty of other sites with the exact same message on it.
The only real way to block it would be to put the forum behind a paywall. Even a $1 a year membership would probably kill it, but then it might also reduce the number of people who participate at all, given the large number of posters who don't even pay for a Basic membership.
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A partial work-around at best... My GKD page 1 now has 5 posts.
Why not make it so new users require moderator / administration approval? We have enough forum staff approved should take less than a few hours at any given time of day.
I'm on another forum where the members directly approve new members based on their introduction post (intro post must get 5 likes).
What I'm saying is I'm afraid to even click on some of these threads, because I don't know just what they contain. Folks delivering viruses and malware are getting more and more creative in how they do it.
Yo Mama
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And we'll cry uncontrollably at the loss of a valued member such as yourself........
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That's a reasonable precaution. There's no reason to open the posts anyway, they are just junk. You can instead go to the user profile of the poster and report the user from there, rather than opening the post to report it.
Awesome to know.
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I don't know if that is implemented here or not. I know that some forums I visited in the past had rules like that to stop fully automated bots, especially when you didn't need to provide an e-mail address and validate it by following an e-mailed link. But again, if there is a human at the controls, they can just make 5 junk posts to random threads and bypass it.
Every so often you will see someone using an old tactic which is to copy/paste some other post in a thread to the tail end of the thread as their new post, which doesn't require them to know English. That was how spammers of old would boost post counts to get past limits.