Spam problems of late

[Eero Tuovinen]

The Forge's had quite a lot of spamming over the last week or so, more than usually if I'm any judge. Maybe something special going on in spammer-land, like they figured a particularly effective bot for working the SMF forum software or something.

Perhaps something could be done about this? Ideas? I imagine that the moderation must be getting tired about removing the spam by hand as it appears.

[Ron Edwards]

It has been pretty bad, and most of it seems to have come from the same source, or at least the same priorities. Vincent has been in Italy for the past few days, and I'm not sure when he returns home, exactly. After that, he and I will figure something out, which really means he figures something out and I say, "That's great."

Best, Ron

[Christoph Boeckle]

If I may, designating some auxiliary moderators whose only permissions are to split and move threads (to the Inactive File as it occurs) could be a solution with little technological fiddling involved, and that could easily be undone in case of a mistakenly identified spambot.

Cheers
Christoph

[Ron Edwards]

Vincent and I Cloaked, conspiratorial persons of power have discussed that option a few of years ago in our telephone conversations their shadowy, mysterious meetings. The verdict was to see if spam became a real problem; it didn't at that time. Now it is. I'm definitely beginning to think the idea needs re-visiting.

Another issue is that although I'm technically empowered to ban posters, and have no qualms about doing so to spambots, I ... uh ... well, I don't know how. The interface defeats me. So Vincent is the only one who can do that, and it so happens that he's probably still in recovery from his international journey, not to mention probably being mobbed for five days straight. So please be patient for a little, small, tiny bit longer.

Best, Ron

[lumpley]

I'll ban some spambots today. Ron, it's as easy as clicking on their username to get their profile and then clicking on "ban this user," so please feel free as the opportunity presents itself.

Last time we had a big spam problem, the technical solution was overeager in marking our posts as spam, so we chose to deal with the spam by hand instead.

If the waves of spam this past week were from the same couple-few spambots, then we won't need to conscript anyone to help, we can just be sure to ban spambots immediately next time. If something more complicated is going on, then sure, let's revisit the question (in a shadowy, mysterious meeting, of course).

-Vincent

[lumpley]

Looking through it, not only were there only around a dozen spambots, but most of them shared IPs. Banning the first one would have blocked almost all of the rest.

A policy of prompt banning for spambots looks to be all the solution we need.

-Vincent