Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion why?

Do we have all this spam coming through again??

(thinking one way to get rid of it .. is to make posts)

I have no idea because unless someone is doing this because they are annoyed there seems little reason. I can't imagine anyone on this board actually responding to the spam.

The best way to get rid of it is for the moderator to notice. But I assume the moderators are in a different time zone, since they didn't see anything till morning yesterday. I also assume from the timing of the spam, that the spammers are in yet a different time zone since it started last night at 10/11pm.. was a problem till mid-morning and has just started up again.

The real problem is how to keep it from happening again. Best thing is not to click on ANY of it.

Well it isn't very discreet. Some of the spam on other sites almost looks like genuine posts.

Well, presumably the mods are in the US and the spammers in India, so....

but I want my love problem solution!!!!

Spammers likely have automated tools telling them how trafficked various forums are, and the cost of spamming lots of sites is probably pretty low. They are not doing careful analyses of the interests of members of various forums.

I suggest that the first message or two of each new member be held for moderation.

Could there be two levels of moderators? Any one of us "junior moderators" could zap obvious spam. The senior moderators would continue to use their judgement about when threads have veered off-topic or become too acrimonious.

Clearly, some school problems on this board could only be solved using black magic. Maybe we should change the advocacy recs on the site.

I clicked on the notify moderator button and then just put in the text that there were a lot of spam messages. I think the moderators are in a different time zone than me, so hopefully in a couple hours they will take care of it.

My first 2-3 posts on this board were held until the moderator put them through.

I see 99 posts in a time span from 8pm-3am, that's 7 hours of posts, over 14 posts per hour, or one post about every 4 minutes on average.

Some may say that a desperately poor person is posting here as free advertising, in an attempt to make money through black magic and aghori. Even when a moderator removes posts, the contents may remain in search engines.

It is possible that one person posting here has led to "competitors" posting here as well.

Not sure what the nature of these are, but in the case of something like the Nigerian scam, it was found that the more obvious they made their spam look like a scam, the more it paid off. Apparently, only the dumbest, most gullible people replied, and so the scammers spent their time more efficiently, rather than wasting time on people who were unlikely to pay.

This spammer is looking for a phone call as a next step in the scam, so I expect the same dynamic applies.

As comedy fodder, they're priceless. Anyone wanna "Be free from enemy 2nd wife"? Or, "Attract any GirlBoy towards you with heart"?

In my experience, it's often Pakistani IP addresses these days.

Er-- or Indonesian.

{sigh}

Once in a while, you'll get someone using a 'virgin' IP address (or family of them) that hasn't been flagged in SPAM indices, and they can do-- well, this-- until you ban them and flag them in one of the SPAM registries.

Forum spam is a major headache, let me just add, even with a top-notch filter that weeds out a lot of them.

Oh-- and the other thing that happens is that occasionally, spammers are looking to exceed some number of posts so that they 'unlock' forum features-- like member lists, which (hopefully, from their perspective) include e-mail addresses. Selling them is worth some money.

Of course, in this arms race, most forum administrators are now wise to this, and even with hundreds of posts, that kind of info just isn't available to regular members of a forum.

At my site, we still allow members to share their e-mail addresses, but the threshold for seeing them is pretty significant-- and the threshold for viewing some of the private places in the forum is, as well. Very few of them make it through to that level.

But a few try every month.

We had a problem with spam two or three years ago, and it was resolved by putting posts from new users into a moderation queue, as Howdy noted. I've been wondering if that policy has been discontinued. I hope not.

My guess is that they found a back door means around it. (This is the problem with automating post-count related member categories.)

We still moderate the first three posts of every new user, however they have figured out how to post beyond that. We are working on a way to solve this.

Good luck.

I have a suggestion - indigo posted above that the post count is several per hour over a period of time. So, you could add a filter to the spam detector that if the same/similar IPs (or messages following a similar theme) post more than a certain number of messages per hour (e.g. 10/hour), their messages should be automatically "quarantined" in a queue before an admin/moderator releases them.

Flooding controls, yes.

(Our forum uses them, but it's a shorter time-frame and a rate that is more like 2 per minute or something.) A very determined/desperate person COULD still do it, but it wouldn't be very lucrative.

Generally forum spammers are low-paid virtual sweatshop help, and they get paid by the link/post, often very, very little per post (think pennies at the outside).

A combination approach works pretty well, incidentally-- that is, have post-controls that top out at some number of posts on the forum in order to show up at all... and/or flood controls, and/or regional/aggressive spam filtering, and/or control usergroups so that you have to manually move new members into more privileged membergroups (that way spammers can't defeat the post-count thing through sheer persistence).