Melgar
Anti-Spam Agent
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Getting rid of forum spam
I used to run a PHP bulletin board, and one of the easiest ways to prevent bots posting is to ask a really basic question during registration, and
only proceed if it's answered correctly. Like, "What is the chemical symbol for carbon?" 99% of spambots would get stuck on that, which would make
things easier for moderators, I'm sure.
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j_sum1
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The problem is that a lot of the spammers here are not bots -- apparently.
This has been suggested numerous times in the other thread on the topic, Tired of reporting spam.
I am sure a captcha or registration question or minor restriction on new posters would help. And I would have thought that something along those
lines might have been done by now. Nevertheless it impresses me how quickly spam gets reported and deleted around here. It has been a pretty bad 24
hours but the board is still pretty clean of the text vermin.
My preference would be for a "Begone Spammer" button that would delete and destroy if a small number of established members clicked it. Functionally
the same as the report button and typing in "spam" but a whole lot quicker. (In my ideal word) the button would only appear for posters that had
registered less than ten days ago.
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JJay
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A lot of spammers who post to message boards are low-paid individuals from some podunk region that doesn't have many job opportunities. So they agree
to make 100 forum posts at 2 cents/post or something like that. They'd be able to get past simple questions that can generally be answered only by
humans pretty easily and could probably even demonstrate knowledge of chemistry, although for the going rate, they might not want to bother
researching a difficult question.
They can't just post to one board, so their IP addresses get flagged pretty quickly, and you can keep out a lot of them if you use an antispam API
like Akismet. Some of them can also watch for known spam URLs and/or likely spam phrases.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3zjRcMnRNY
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Melgar
Anti-Spam Agent
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I used to run a PHP bulletin board, guys, and I'm currently CTO of an e-commerce startup company that does about a million in sales a month. I know
what I'm talking about. Spambots work by scouring websites and looking for html that is indicative of specific bulletin board software. If it
matches a known configuration, it runs a script to automatically register a user account, then if that succeeds, just posts advertising spam wherever
it can. It doesn't have to succeed 100% of the time to accomplish its goals, or even 50% of the time, or even 10% of the time. Like email spam, it's
a numbers game. For the guy that writes the code that runs the bot, coding an exception that only applies on one website would be a huge waste of
time. If there is a human behind the bots ever, it's usually someone registering email addresses for the spambots to use, by filling in captchas on
like ten devices at once, but captchas specific to one free email provider, generally yahoo. Each address can send out many thousands of spam
messages before it's noticed, so in this case, it makes more sense for a person to be involved. But judging from the relevance and quality of the
spam that's posted here, I would bet better than even money that there is no human behind them, and putting up the slightest obstacle to spam bots
would virtually eliminate them. I know this, because it happened on a bulletin board I used to run, and this type of solution virtually ended
spambots after it was implemented.
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violet sin
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Well that would be terrific. We use to be able to report the crud, and after a few reports, auto-boot. But it seems a lot of the stuff im seeing
right before bed is still there in the morning, with numerous member views. I'm assuming from the names they give these things, no one could think
there were anything less than spam. So further assuming it is flagged as spam by at least half those viewers, why is it not gone?
Are we not getting enough trusted names to get a killshot? Are people looking but not actually reporting?? Are they viewing it themselves so as to
look like it may have been reported by real members??? what gives?
At least I have seen precious few of the 25 posts in a row spammers. And for sure, I am not knocking those in position to deal with this for not
doing well enough. Just seems like we have had a bit of an upturn, and some hours are more heavily traveled than others
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Cryolite.
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I'm still not sure why we don't have a better registration process though. The email confirmation thing just does not come close to stopping these
spammers. Why don't we have a registration process that requires some actual chemistry knowledge to pass? We ask questions like, "Enter the following
number, rounded to two decimal places: grams of oxygen in 2 mol of glucose plus molar mass in grams of element Tc". Sure wolfram alpha can probably
get it, but it's a reasonable first measure against the really low effort bots we have at the moment. Plus, it should improve the quality of new users
(albeit marginally) 
[Edited on 18-4-2017 by Cryolite.]
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unionised
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What is the current system?
OK, so I gather that the spam reporting system goes something like this
Someone posts spam.
I see it, report it with the word "spam" and that gets fed to the forum software. (Is it case sensitive?"
What happens next?
Does it count reports + ditch threads that get more than "x" reports as spam?
Does it ignore me because I'm not a Mod?
Does the notification just let some poor soul whose job is spam trashing, know about the post?
Is there some system where, when I first reported spam the system ignored me because it "didn't know who I am", but now it counts my notification
because I'm "trusted" because my reports were accurate before?
How many people need to say "This is spam" before it's discarded?
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Texium
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With the current system, if two "trusted" members or one moderator reports a post as spam (the word spam anywhere in the report, not case sensitive
IIRC) the thread will be deleted and the spammer's account automatically terminated. I don't know if there is still a manual list of trusted members
or if there's now a program for determining who is trusted and who isn't based on post count/tenure/etc. If it is still manual it likely needs
updating, but that's up to Polverone. If someone has replied to the thread the code does not work, which is why I strongly discourage replying to spam
threads with "thread reported" or witty banter. It also doesn't work for deleting posts that are tacked on to existing threads. I still have to
manually delete those.
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j_sum1
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Quote: Originally posted by zts16  | | I don't know if there is still a manual list of trusted members or if there's now a program for determining who is trusted and who isn't based on post
count/tenure/etc. If it is still manual it likely needs updating, but that's up to Polverone. |
Can you check this out with Polverone please? It seems to me that it is requiring more than two reports at the moment.
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unionised
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| Quote: Originally posted by zts16 | | With the current system, if two "trusted" members or one moderator reports a post as spam (the word spam anywhere in the report, not case sensitive
IIRC) the thread will be deleted and the spammer's account automatically terminated. I don't know if there is still a manual list of trusted members
or if there's now a program for determining who is trusted and who isn't based on post count/tenure/etc. If it is still manual it likely needs
updating, but that's up to Polverone. If someone has replied to the thread the code does not work, which is why I strongly discourage replying to spam
threads with "thread reported" or witty banter. It also doesn't work for deleting posts that are tacked on to existing threads. I still have to
manually delete those. |
Thanks for that.
I think we need more "trusted" members.
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karlos³
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I report nowadays nearly every day a spam-post, i.e. one each visit...
How comes it is so much today? And much of it is now in either kyrillic or chinese, the rest nonsense.
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Melgar
Anti-Spam Agent
Posts: 2004
Registered: 23-2-2010
Location: Connecticut
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| Quote: Originally posted by Cryolite. | I'm still not sure why we don't have a better registration process though. The email confirmation thing just does not come close to stopping these
spammers. Why don't we have a registration process that requires some actual chemistry knowledge to pass? We ask questions like, "Enter the following
number, rounded to two decimal places: grams of oxygen in 2 mol of glucose plus molar mass in grams of element Tc". Sure wolfram alpha can probably
get it, but it's a reasonable first measure against the really low effort bots we have at the moment. Plus, it should improve the quality of new users
(albeit marginally)
[Edited on 18-4-2017 by Cryolite.] |
Even just a really basic question that can be looked up on a periodic table of elements would be more than enough to stop a spambot. They're really
pretty dumb, to be honest, and we don't want to put up obstacles that'd keep high-school chemistry students away.
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