Spam Spam and More Spam

[mbbrutman]

There has been an increase in spam lately .. spam comes in many forms.

• Blatant 'Buy iPod/Nokia/whatever here for low price!'
• Seemingly innocent (but usually off topic) messages with links in the .sig lines. (.Sig spam is not allowed.)
• 'I am looking for a product that can do ____, how does it compare to product _____?' where the products are named and off topic.
• 'I am a newbie - hi!' with no further content about what they collect. Chances are that if they neglect to mention what they are interested in, it is just an opening for spam.
• Etc.

If you see people doing this do us a favor .. resist. Don't respond to it. Report it to the moderators by clicking on the

icon on the post. Type in a brief message explaining what you think is wrong, and then move along to something more worthy.

Your moderators will get email, make an informed judgment, and then clean things up if necessary. If it turns out to be a spammer the user id gets permanently banned.

To those of you who have been reporting the spam, thanks .. it makes our job easier. I think that all of the moderators try to read every message, but the spam reports let us home in on the garbage much quicker.

 

[Sharkonwheels]

Heh - Sorry - I could NOT resist that one last night!!!

I will be a good boy from now on on the spams! :D


T

 

[mbbrutman]

Np. I get annoyed too and try to be funny once in a while as well. ;-)

 

[carlsson]

I wonder if any forum software has a built-in protection from posting the exact same message twice in a row? Sometimes I feel that would be an interesting add-on both to cut down on spam, accidental double posting and semi-legimate cross posting.

 

[atari2600a]

I think it would take too much CPU & disk usage to be feasible...

 

[bbcmicro]

I think it would take too much CPU & disk usage to be feasible...

How? I'd have thought it would be fairly simple. A naive implementation would be to keep a file of recent posts and check each new post against the records contained in it, if it is identical to recent posts then its submission would be rejected. A quick check shouldn't overload a PC. It may do if there were multiple posts a minute.
I don't know, if I thought about it too long I'd get bogged down in details.

 

[atari2600a]

Yeah, but the bots never use recent posts, so a cache-based system wouldn't really be of any help.

 

[Vlad]

There are advanced pattern matching systems that could do that with extreme ease, but to implement something like that for forum would be a bit much. As long as people report the posts, they are usually dealt with in a timely manner.

 

[nige the hippy]

you know, all we need to do is filter out posts by people whose names are nearly, but not quite, English!

 

[chuckcmagee]

Oh, I finally noticed the "Petter". That like Salt Petter?

 

[grant]

There has been an increase in spam lately .. spam comes in many forms.

• Blatant 'Buy iPod/Nokia/whatever here for low price!'
• Seemingly innocent (but usually off topic) messages with links in the .sig lines. (.Sig spam is not allowed.)
• 'I am looking for a product that can do ____, how does it compare to product _____?' where the products are named and off topic.
• 'I am a newbie - hi!' with no further content about what they collect. Chances are that if they neglect to mention what they are interested in, it is just an opening for spam.
• Etc.

If you see people doing this do us a favor .. resist. Don't respond to it. Report it to the moderators by clicking on the

icon on the post. Type in a brief message explaining what you think is wrong, and then move along to something more worthy.

Your moderators will get email, make an informed judgment, and then clean things up if necessary. If it turns out to be a spammer the user id gets permanently banned.

To those of you who have been reporting the spam, thanks .. it makes our job easier. I think that all of the moderators try to read every message, but the spam reports let us home in on the garbage much quicker.

There is a simple fix to this problem, but it requires English speaking people for registering. I have had 1 or 2 spam registrations in the past 6-8 months. If Erik is interested, I can go over it with him again.

 

[Erik]

There is a simple fix to this problem, but it requires English speaking people for registering. I have had 1 or 2 spam registrations in the past 6-8 months. If Erik is interested, I can go over it with him again.

Yeah, I'm familiar with the mod (I even implemented a variation of it on my guestbook) but I prefer to run unmolested software here since it makes the uprades easier. . .