Spammer

There is a report button by every post. Please do not create threads like this. Instead, simply report offending posts and threads with helpful tags.

Your search doesn't come up with anything. Either it's timed out or they've been removed.


Ah, I see. So I shouldn't bother reporting anything at all or try to help people report more efficiently.

I would do well as a moderator. Little talk, lots of action. None of this spammer nonsense would be around for very long at all.

I guess the report button doesn't always work well. In my email, I see several reports from dcsimages on Oct 15, but nothing between April and Oct 15.

I try to attend to spam at least two sessions a day, and even with several mods, reported spam is often going to be visible for a few hours.

I'll ask what's going on.

Anything to report?

I gave up reporting spam because there was little or no response. After a while I figured the site owners were allowing spam probably for a fee.

Make me a moderator and I'll delete the spam.

I'm pretty sure there isn't any spam allowed for a fee, there are regular ads for that.

I'm curious if some sort of anti-email spam system is preventing mods from getting spam. I don't have them in my spam folder though.

I didn't get any response in the moderator forum, sometimes that's a tumbleweed haven. I've just PMd one of the administrators directly.

Were any of these reports for posts in the Political Outsider subforum?

Any update on the functioning of the spam report tool? Working? Not Working?

I haven't heard back. I think it's working so far.

We get a lot of Polish spam, and we're starting to get spammers who hide their crap inside comments that are very nearly on-topic.

To the former, can an IP address or two be blocked to stop this nonsense?

To the latter, would modifying the sign-up process help at all?

The spam we get varies a lot so IP addresses won't block it sufficiently. When the spam got to a point where it was clear nothing was there to stop it, a filter was put in place to catch repeated posts from new users (much less sexually explicit and video encoder spam gets through, credit card fraud etc.). I keep track of spam that crops up and update the ruleset when I can - it's at over 400 rules so far and it catches a decent amount to keep the spam manageable. I have to edit the rules carefully to avoid false positives - if you filter out cialis but someone writes specialist then it catches it if the regular expression isn't right and there are also weights on certain keywords that have to be set to avoid catching non-spammers that use those words infrequently.

I believe recaptcha was put into the signup process but I'm not sure. Some spam will just have to be dealt with manually as some of the spam is in fact people not bots who sign up just to spam and it's often from China but it's fairly easy to spot when you've seen how spammers write for a few years (obviously I don't want to say which posting techniques are hard to pick up so spammers know how to spam ). The stuff that gets through pretty much gets flushed daily and often quicker.

There are other services that can be used to block spam such as akismet but it does the same as the filter we have except with our own filter, we can correct the false positives ourselves and adjust the ruleset to be specific to the spam we get. You can tell from moderators' post counts that we use the forum regularly so we are aware of the spam and I know it's frustrating having to see spam and wish you could fix it there and then but the system in place works well enough to keep the forum clean. I check the forum by recent threads so they show up pretty clearly in my normal browsing session and I check the spam reports if there's any still left.

Ideally the filter will be refined to the point where only the most obscure and harmless spam gets through but it will take time.

most of us know that spammers are normally asking questions and praise the site characteristics this is the identification of spammers they never come with solutions

Indeed. As noted by kxcd, there is a solution:

Spammers have altered their standard posting technique over time. I've come across some that looked relatively legit, but found they stole a post from earlier in the thread and attached a web link.