Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Mature Galleries a spam deletion test

j_sum1 - 9-10-2018 at 22:19

This is to test the spam deletion script that Melgar is trialling.

jsumxgwsukspamtester - 9-10-2018 at 22:53

Ok, the thread remains. But the test I did under a new registration disappeared quickly.
We can leave this thread here for Melgar to take a look at when he wakes up.

This development seems to be an extremely positive one. Thanks, Melgar.

j_sum1.

Gearhead_Shem_Tov - 10-10-2018 at 02:59

So, given the page full of new spam that's stacked up should we go back to reporting it as usual?

[Edited on 10-10-2018 by Gearhead_Shem_Tov]

j_sum1 - 10-10-2018 at 03:49

Melgar is putting together a list of identifiers to catch spam. A close look at the titles and it is notable that many of the common spam words are missing.

It won't hurt to leave it there so he can see what has slipped through the net. OTOH, it would not surprise me if he was collecting that data anyway.

Sorry, I can't give a better answer than that.

JJay - 10-10-2018 at 04:08

There are many sound and rational individuals on this board who would make acceptable moderators. Don't worry; the damage will hopefully be minimal. If you want, I could put together an AI bot that messages Melgar with links to the spam messages so a bot can delete them. I don't know how useful that would be to Melgar.

streety - 10-10-2018 at 04:10

If Melgar isn't collecting it I am. I would go ahead and delete it.

I can send him several thousand spam posts I've collected over the past few months.

Amos - 10-10-2018 at 07:28

reported for false advertising

Melgar - 10-10-2018 at 08:34

Sheesh. I take the script down for a couple of hours to work on it and the pitchforks come out. The difference with my bot is that there's hard-coded rules that will delete spam without any oversight by a person, other than via reading the log file later. It got hundreds of spam messages overnight, so it wasn't like it was a failure. And after reading the logs, they indeed were all spam. I feel like a lot of spam is designed to circumvent common Bayesian filter algorithms, and tried using a few hard-coded rules that are specific to this forum's content instead.

Since j_sum1 is normally the only one at the helm during night in the western hemisphere, he probably noticed that there was less spam than usual during his shift? I'm going to start it running again while I go work on some of my other obligations for today.

[Edited on 10/10/18 by Melgar]

JJay - 10-10-2018 at 08:45

It looked like the spammers were running amok last night, but things do seem to have improved somewhat. I wouldn't worry too much about jealous script kiddees sending armies of spam accounts to sack your castle.

I really try not to dislike anyone on this board or hold anything against them from previous posts. I'll message you privately and let you know what my concerns are.

[Edited on 10-10-2018 by JJay]

fusso - 10-10-2018 at 14:07

Quote: Originally posted by Melgar  
@JJay I'm sorry if you don't like me very much. I am aware that I can be immature at times, and often say things without thinking very hard about what I'm saying. I've been diagnosed with ADHD for most of my life, and the medication only helps so much with that. In getting moderator privileges, I did promise to only use them for spam-fighting purposes, and not to actually do anything to user content. Hence the custom rank. I've also done quite a bit of work on transferring this site's content over to phpBB, and if you look at where I've been discussing that, you can see that I've made more progress with it than anyone else has to date. So that also, has been part of the reasoning for needing additional privileges. I hope you're okay with that, because I don't harbor any bad feelings towards you, and would like if it were mutual.

[Edited on 10/10/18 by Melgar]
What? I can't see any immature content in Melgar's posts.

diddi - 10-10-2018 at 14:15

I would like to acknowledge Melgar's positive efforts in trying to work around our outdated software to at least have a try at getting on top of the spam problem. So thanks from me even if others may appear keen to be critical.

Melgar - 10-10-2018 at 14:37

Sorry, I didn't mean to act dramatic. Nothing to see here. I took the spam catcher down temporarily this morning to fix a few issues with the code, and the boards got hit with a whole bunch of spam all at once, during that interval. So I think maybe it looked like I was gloating about a success that wasn't real. Now that it's running again though, it does actually seem to be working, because there have only been like 2-3 spam reports all day. Before, it was like 100 a day, at least.

It's really just a stop-gap measure until we can get more modern software powering this forum. But I hope it'll make the moderators' lives a bit easier, if nothing else. If I were Polverone, I'd probably be hesitant to come back to like 10,000 new U2U messages too.

Tsjerk - 11-10-2018 at 03:37

Could it be the bots monitor how many of their spam is in today's posts and spam accordingly? Shouldn't be a problem as long as the killabot stays online