Preventing Spammy Posts
I've noticed a few spammy / advertising posts lately from 1st timers. Are these 'autobot' posts by creating accounts and replying to a google search script (if that's possible) or human spammers?
Was wondering if there should or could be a way to crack down before it get's out of hand
Obviously, the persistent human is a lot harder to stop creating several user accounts
Any thoughts?
Loving the site, keep up the good work
Was wondering if there should or could be a way to crack down before it get's out of hand
Obviously, the persistent human is a lot harder to stop creating several user accounts
Any thoughts?
Loving the site, keep up the good work
Comments
I've noticed a few spammy / advertising posts lately from 1st timers. Are these 'autobot' posts by creating accounts and replying to a google search script (if that's possible) or human spammers?
Was wondering if there should or could be a way to crack down before it get's out of hand
Obviously, the persistent human is a lot harder to stop creating several user accounts
Any thoughts?
Loving the site, keep up the good work
Yeah, they're bot postings.
Trust me, I'd love to be able to reduce spam to zero here.
we should simply recognize them and not view them so there count goes to zero and passes by
like some of my questions on the genius bar
Bots can sometimes figure them out anyway, and doesn't AI already use CAPTCHAs? I don't remember since it's been a while since I signed up.
Sebastian
Yep, we do use captchas. As you can tell, they're virtually useless.
Yep, we do use captchas. As you can tell, they're virtually useless.
Really? I used to get hundreds of spam comments per day in the form of comments on my site, but when I implemented CAPTCHA I've never gotten a spam comment since.
I took a look at the registration CAPTCHAS and no OCR software could read those. The spammers may be posting the threads/spam automatically, but I think you have humans signing up for the spam accounts.
In order to get rid of spam, I'd implement a probationary period, if possible. Something like this: new users can't post new content for 3 days and their first 10 comments are moderated.
Really? I used to get hundreds of spam comments per day in the form of comments on my site, but when I implemented CAPTCHA I've never gotten a spam comment since.
I took a look at the registration CAPTCHAS and no OCR software could read those. The spammers may be posting the threads/spam automatically, but I think you have humans signing up for the spam accounts.
In order to get rid of spam, I'd implement a probationary period, if possible. Something like this: new users can't post new content for 3 days and their first 10 comments are moderated.
http://sam.zoy.org/pwntcha/
If they only get one try to guess, the bot can't brute force it and IMO it's way easier than trying to figure out those scrambled messages.
http://sam.zoy.org/pwntcha/
Here is one example of the captcha I use:
It's customizable to the point where I can add noise, lines, change the font to any true type font I provide, and exclude or include certain characters, numbers, and symbols. Also, once thing I notice about it's implementation is that the images that appear are generated dynamically with php, so they are not generated and stored as image files -- meaning that once the page has loaded and the captcha displayed, no image file exists. So the embed code for the captcha image would look like this:
<img src="/image_captcha/1939250506" />
But that's not an image file so when when you try to load that in a browser, you get nothing.
On the other side of things, I also use reCAPTCHA for another site, which seems to be extremely effective. reCAPTCHA aims at providing captcha challenges to prevent spam, but also to digitize books by having humans translate the scanned words into text. Some of the letters are completely unrecognizable as individual letters, but because the letters are in full words, the human brain can understand.
Spammers typically target the whole board with items for sale. If vbulletin could add a way to automatically filter some "spammy" posts that would be cool. For instance
Messagesboards that have items sold every now and then could implement a solution like this.
1. Create a "for sale" section on the boards. ALL items for sale would be sold here and only here.
2. For sale items would have to have "FS." in the main title. Any post to the "for sale" section that does not have a "FS." appened to the title would automaticall be deleted and a PM would be sent to the author.
Spammers that attempt to add sale items in other areas would find their posts automatically torched immediately.
As a secondary percaution there'd be a "spam" button on every post. New posts would be subject to this spam button for say a predetermined amount of time. A threshold would be set so that say if a new post hits and enough users deem it spam it's removed after receiving too many hits.
Fighting spam is going to take tiered approach but I'm sure it can effectively be dealt with
Just make the first 10 posts moderated!
I 2nd that!
Still there.
Boy this porn spam has been in general discussion for 18 hours now. I reported it about 12 hours ago.
Still there.
I agree.
Right now = Today, 2:58 PM
Porny post = Yesterday, 5:11 PM
Still not deleted.
That's ridiculous.