More spam

[snowbear]

It's being looked into. When I was made mod for the contests, I had privileges for only those forums, but couldn't do anything outside of that area. The technical stuff is being checked and should have an answer soon.

 

[limr]

It looks like I am wasting my time this morning..???

As Charlie mentioned, we're in the US so the only thing I'm seeing at 0430 is the inside of my eyelids. We do have one moderator, Overread, in the UK, but this is a volunteer gig and we all go through some periods when we have busier-than-usual lives and aren't able to be on TPF as often, so maybe he's got something going on and hasn't been able to get to TPF to delete the spam before we wake up in the States.

Believe me, we get to it as soon as possible. This kind of bot spamming with dozens of posts at the same time is an anomaly - normally it's just a handful of posts and as petrochemist said, it's easy enough to scroll past them. I understand when the bots hit us like they are now, it's harder to ignore and can make the forum difficult to read, but unless we have some paid moderators to be on spam duty 24/7, it's an unfortunate reality of the internet that we may have to deal with seeing some spam for a few hours.

We do actually get to quite a bit of the spam posts and users before they are ever able to post. We have moderator notifications of posts or users waiting for permission to post, and they are almost always spam, so those get deleted before they ever see the light of day. We also try to be to be fairly proactive when possible - remember those PMs everyone used to get, asking to be friends with some Maria person or join a sex chat, something like that? There was a pattern to the usernames that became very easy to recognize so I spent a week or so haunting the new member list and deleting those accounts before they posted anything. And when a user is spammed, any other account using the same IP is listed so we can spam those as well.

So please, we are doing all that we can. And yes, there may be the possibility of adding some spam cops.

In the meantime, I'd like to ask everyone a favor. When you see spam, please report it and also add the "Spam reported" message so others don't have to report it. Also know that if you report one message from a spammer, it is NOT necessary to report every message from that same spammer. Once we spam/ban that user, ALL their messages get deleted at the same time. So while we appreciate the vigilance and enthusiasm for helping keep TPF spam free, it's also overwhelming to see 80+ notifications for spam reports.

Thanks everyone!

 

[Fujidave]

Seems like a lot more today sadly.

 

[snowbear]

They seem to go in cycles. Eventually we get them blocked, then in a few years, another persistent one comes along.

 

[Jeff15]

Maybe the way of joining our forum needs an update..??

 

[snowbear]

That's a question for the administrators. The problem with that is legitimate users can be turned off by it and may move on to another site. I personally hate dual authentication where I have to sign on with a password, then hope the email or text message comes through; I don't always have my phone. Every time I change my password at work, I have to authenticate from my phone.

There are some automatic processes that will queue up messages that are believed to be spam and other banned users. These posts have to be approved by a moderator (or administrator) before they can be seen by the general public. I usually see up to to 20 when I sign on in the morning. It seems to catch more than 95% of the garbage. But once in a while, like now, a couple 'bots' are able to slip through. The user names and IP addresses are unknown to the system.

And thank you for your vigilance.

 

[weepete]

It's really difficult to keep on top of the spam and there are some clever ways around it. I run a small forum for my fishing club, and we've resorted to having a Q&A to even register, due to the sheer number of spam users trying to register. It wouldn't work for a forum this big, though it's killed our spam problem.

 

[petrochemist]

This has become a regular problem again, with new posts showing around 95% spam every morning (in the UK).
Is there any way to configure the forum to reject other alphabets as all these spam posts are almost entirely in Chinese?
Alternatively requiring first posts to be approved would also stop this & probably reduce the workload for admins

 

[480sparky]

This was an ongoing issue on a forum I used to be a mod on. And the reason I was a mod was I was asked to be one to mitigate things like this.

 

[RAZKY]

We've been requested to report this spam, but I'm curious. If I report it at, say, 2300 Pacific time. will it awaken a moderator on the East coast at 0200 so they can delete it? Or do they delete it when they wake up and see it? In which case, what's the use in reporting it? Then there's another issue here - ordinarily there are a large number of recent posts, but when the spam is finally deleted, often only 10 or 12 recent posts can be accessed. Most inconvenient to have to dig through the various forums to find the latest posts!

 

[limr]

We've been requested to report this spam, but I'm curious. If I report it at, say, 2300 Pacific time. will it awaken a moderator on the East coast at 0200 so they can delete it? Or do they delete it when they wake up and see it? In which case, what's the use in reporting it? Then there's another issue here - ordinarily there are a large number of recent posts, but when the spam is finally deleted, often only 10 or 12 recent posts can be accessed. Most inconvenient to have to dig through the various forums to find the latest posts!

We do not get alerts to wake us up in the middle of the night. The moderator who sees the notification of the reported post first is usually the person who deletes it. I usually go into the Spam Trashcan forum and remove the deleted posts from public view, but again, this is something that I do when I am able to log in. I try to do it regularly but there's always going to be a delay because of, you know, life and time zones.

Please understand that we are doing as much as we can, and we are just as frustrated that there's not much else we can do ourselves. We're trying to bring this to the attention of the higher admins who might have more control to block this before it gets into the forum.

There often is a list of first posts that need moderator approval but for whatever reason, the spam filters don't catch these - possibly because it seems their first posts are just a sequence of letters rather than the long block of Chinese writing. And once the user is banned, the IP is banned and they can't just create a new account and log in, but the bots are using randomized IP addresses so that's how they keep coming back.

 

[RAZKY]

We do not get alerts to wake us up in the middle of the night. The moderator who sees the notification of the reported post first is usually the person who deletes it. I usually go into the Spam Trashcan forum and remove the deleted posts from public view, but again, this is something that I do when I am able to log in. I try to do it regularly but there's always going to be a delay because of, you know, life and time zones.

Please understand that we are doing as much as we can, and we are just as frustrated that there's not much else we can do ourselves. We're trying to bring this to the attention of the higher admins who might have more control to block this before it gets into the forum.

There often is a list of first posts that need moderator approval but for whatever reason, the spam filters don't catch these - possibly because it seems their first posts are just a sequence of letters rather than the long block of Chinese writing. And once the user is banned, the IP is banned and they can't just create a new account and log in, but the bots are using randomized IP addresses so that's how they keep coming back.

I'm thinking that a moderator ought to see the spam as soon as they log in, whether it's been reported or not. Or am I wrong?

 

[snowbear]

Correct. If the spam (or any other post) is reported, we get a notification in the same way you get a notification that someone has liked or replied to one of your posts. We also get a notification that there are a number of posts waiting to be approved. These are generally spam posts that you don't see.

We see any that creep past the approval service, and don't get reported in the "New posts" list like everyone else.

When we mark a post as spam, whether in the approval queue, or in the wild" all posts by that user are marked and deleted automatically.

I generally log in several times during the day, starting between 6:00 and 7:00 am (eastern time)

 

[RAZKY]

Correct. If the spam (or any other post) is reported, we get a notification in the same way you get a notification that someone has liked or replied to one of your posts. We also get a notification that there are a number of posts waiting to be approved. These are generally spam posts that you don't see.

We see any that creep past the approval service, and don't get reported in the "New posts" list like everyone else.

When we mark a post as spam, whether in the approval queue, or in the wild" all posts by that user are marked and deleted automatically.

I generally log in several times during the day, starting between 6:00 and 7:00 am (eastern time)

You folks all do a fine job - we don't have much else to complain about!

 

[limr]

I'm thinking that a moderator ought to see the spam as soon as they log in, whether it's been reported or not. Or am I wrong?

It depends. When it's an entire page of Chinese language spam, then seeing the notification and seeing the actual spam threads happen pretty much at the same time. Personally, when I check the forum, my eyes go straight to the little red notification alert and so I see that first. And most times, I'll see that notification first before I see the spam thread, which might have moved down the page a ways, or even off the first page of threads with new content. I also then check notifications on the moderators' queue, which alerts us to posts or new members that might be spam. Nine times out of ten, they are and they get deleted before anyone else ever sees them.

In short, yes, the notifications are still useful to us.