Spammers swarming the forums

unwisefool said:
Yay for the mods, what a pain in the rear end it must be to continuously have to clean up the spam.
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Yup. Hits very early just about every morning, for the late risers. And it is now spreading from GKD into other subforums.

Sure its a major pain in the butt for the mods....hence it is worth reading the sticky thread on the subject...help the mods out the most efficient way possible.
 
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umm...yeah. So was the back end. we got hundreds of spam reports.

Unfortunately, when the two people report the same thread, it forms two separate threads in the back end. And when a spambot starts 50 threads and a user reports all of them, We then have 50 reports for one account. It becomes very confusing as to which spammers we have already banned. We've kind of given up on using the backend during a spam-blitz attack.
 
Looks like askimet caught some, but not all of them. I've made some changes that make cleanup a lot easier though
 
Spark said:
Looks like askimet caught some, but not all of them. I've made some changes that make cleanup a lot easier though
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Is new account approval something you could look into?

I've seen other forums where when a new user registers an account, the person has to wait until they are approved by mods before they can post.
 
Rich S said:
Is there a way to block non English characters from being posted?
Rich
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This. Given these threads all have some common features (new users posting, long titles with Korean characters, etc.) it shouldn’t be hard to set up some rules to block such threads from being started.
 
Whatever changes were made seem to have significantly stemmed the tide. Only two accounts banned overnight.
 
First off, a big thank you to the mod staff for all your hard work on this issue. I can only imagine what a huge PITA it is for you to have to deal with this scourge when you'd much rather have time talk about some knives. Thank you.:thumbsup:

Just a thought from someone who doesn't know the intricacies of the issue, but I remember a discussion on the spam issue recently where the suggestion was made to increase the amount of time that had to pass between starting new threads or posting. It sounded like a good idea until a mod said it could make their job a pain, which nobody wants. I was wondering if it would work to have that idea apply only to registered users. It seems like that wouldn't bother the staff trying to do their job, but should reduce the amount of spam that could be posted that they needed to clean up. Unless the spammer wants to pony up $10 for a basic membership to run an all out spam blitz for a couple hours.:D

Just a thought. There could be tons unintended consequences that I don't see.
 
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