GREAT NEW FORUM FOR SPAMMERS.
SLOWER TOO!
Y’know, posts like this REALLY aren’t helpful. They KNOW there’s a spam problem, they are the ones dealing with it. And given that all the crap hits the boards in the wee hours US time, it’s not unexpected that it sits there a while until the Mods get to work. They don’t work 24/7, after all.
FWIW, my board is no slower than it was. Ever think that slowdowns are because the COTH IT folk are trying to work on the bugs everyone’s bitching about?
Good grief, it’s been what, 5 whole days? And two of those days were weekend days.
Seriously guys, show a little appreciation.
And Hey! Presto! It’s 8:01 and they’re all gone. It’s like MAGIC!
(Thank you Mods, most of us really do appreciate the stuff you do 
)
I like the new forums. Spammers are spammers. Most of it is automatic anyway.
When I logged on this morning and clicked on “Today’s Posts” every single post for a page and a half was spam!:eek:
So yea, looks like the spammers have taken over!
I suspect that if you looked at the time stamp on all of those, they’d all have been within a few minutes of each other, and they were the last things submitted to the board, that’s why they came up first.
Spam seems to go in waves, the IT folk will figure this out soon and block them – as soon as they’ve gotten the other bugs that people are reporting sorted out.
It also seems to me that spam really picks up when we have an OT day. Shut that forum down, and it calms back down.
The spam that does hit this board is easy to avoid and disappears pretty quick, so I don’t really understand why people get all up in arms about it.
The spammers were just as active a few weeks before the upgrade. It started back then.
So it’s not the new forum causing more access. It’s new spammers who are very active and persistent. If no one buys any of their products or views any of their movies, etc., and only one person opens a thread by a scanner and reports it, maybe they will go bother someone else. Eventually.
Could I make a suggestion? When a new person signs up, perhaps their very first post could be sent to a moderator before allowing them to go further.
We had spam on this order earlier this year, which prompted us to create a horse-related question for new users to answer during the registration process, in addition to taking some IP address-linked measures.
It’s worked great for months, but we’ve seen a resurgence lately, as we’ve all seen. We tried altering the registration question right before the software upgrade, but it didn’t help very much. We were very limited in the format of the question/answers, etc. we could use with the old software, but one of the benefits of upgrading software to a current version is that we have additional tools, which we’re in the process of implementing, to help combat spam registrations.
We’re trying to avoid some of the more drastic measures of requiring moderator approval of new accounts before they can post, etc., since, as noted before, we’re not always on the site. When somebody creates an account, it’s often because they have a pressing question, and we don’t want to turn them away by making the registration process too prohibitive.
If we have to, we’ll certainly consider other methods of spam prevention, but hopefully the new measures we’re working on activating will help things dramatically.
We hate greeting a new COTH day with spammers too, believe me!
Thanks ~
Mod 1
How about restricting new members to one new thread per day for the first week or so? Plus maybe a post per day limit so they don’t spam other threads. That would allow for urgent questions from legitimate new members while preventing the spammers from completely taking over.
[QUOTE=Sithly;6669771]
How about restricting new members to one new thread per day for the first week or so? Plus maybe a post per day limit so they don’t spam other threads. That would allow for urgent questions from legitimate new members while preventing the spammers from completely taking over.[/QUOTE]
But it would not allow new posters that started a thread to answer questions in their thread as people asked for more information to give them a better answer.
Volunteer mods, trusted long timers given the right to change post titles (only), to tack the word SPAM: to the left of the subject line.
That way Coth readers know not to open it, and Moderators can to a quick search to locate (review and delete) the posts.
Even trusted volunteers should not be able to delete posts or edit post contents, that could be misused. But adding one word to the title should be helpful. A script that takes the subject, then adds Spam to the left of the subject might not be that hard. Then add a button to the interface.
Then, I guess you’d need a new category, userWithPrivilege. But you already have categories based on the number of posts, so it might be easier to implement.
A filter based on the time of day that volunteers are allowed to operate the button, say 5pm to 9am or weekends could be helpful too.
As annoying as the spam posts are I do not see why it is that big of a deal. Just close and move on when you open one by accident. Once someone has alerted the mods about the spam it will be removed when they have time and no longer an issue.
[QUOTE=trubandloki;6669803]
But it would not allow new posters that started a thread to answer questions in their thread as people asked for more information to give them a better answer.[/QUOTE]
Sure it would, if they could start one new thread per day and make, say, 3-5 posts per day. It would cut down on the spammers who start like 10 new threads every morning and fill up the entire “Today’s Posts” with spam.
[QUOTE=Sithly;6669860]
Sure it would, if they could start one new thread per day and make, say, 3-5 posts per day. It would cut down on the spammers who start like 10 new threads every morning and fill up the entire “Today’s Posts” with spam.[/QUOTE]
You said in your original email a post per day limit. Not 3-5 posts per day.
[QUOTE=trubandloki;6669852]
As annoying as the spam posts are I do not see why it is that big of a deal. Just close and move on when you open one by accident. Once someone has alerted the mods about the spam it will be removed when they have time and no longer an issue.[/QUOTE]
Well none of this is a big deal, obviously. It’s just an Internet forum. No one is saying suggestions for improving content and user experience are on par with world peace.
When you get right down to it, the only people who REALLY have a legit reason to care are the advertisers.
Sorry, I might not have been clear enough. I meant one new thread (brand new topic), 3-5 posts (as in replies to other threads).
The problem with spammers, is accidentally clicking on their post and being taken to their infected website or downloading malicious scripts.
We’re working on some solutions behind the scenes. We were able to virtually eliminate spam earlier this year after we had a previous “bloom” like the one we’re experiencing now.
Rest assured that we’ll figure out a way to address it. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do so without hampering new legitimate users, but we’ll work on something along those lines if we have to.
Thanks for your patience!
Mod 1
