Dealing with Spammers

[Chordite]

Maybe if the first five posts from newbies had to pass across a moderators desk before publishing?

[daddymack]

We have asked for numerous types of limits to no avail...but this version of vBullspittin doesn't care about spammers. All we can ask is that rather than responding to them, you report spam posts immediately. We will find them and zap them.

[Phil O'Keefe]

 

Spam is a never-ending battle for sites like this, and most likely always will be. We'll put some new countermeasures in place (and I do believe they have a couple of things planned in that regard) which will work for a while, but then the spammers will figure out a way around them and we're back to square one. Rinse and repeat.

 

The mods really deserve kudos for their incessant spam deletion efforts. We get tons of spam, and some of us are deleting it multiple times daily. I get all the spam reports (and like daddymack said, when you flag a spam post, it helps us get to it faster, so kudos to the folks who flag spam too!), and that's a huge help, but we also delete a bunch of it before it ever gets reported - we're always on the lookout for it and we delete it on sight. Another thing I like to do is to go to the main list of forums (right here) and look at the latest posts. It's usually pretty easy to figure out which ones are likely to be spam based on the user name and the thread title. Anything that looks suspicious I check out, and if it's spam, I delete it and ban the spammer.

 

[bieke]

No spam firewall in vB5

There also have been some security exploits and hundreds of security patches for vB5

This is the only forum that I visit that can't manage to block spam

In the Lesson Loft forums, Dendy said that lessons had to be approved by a mod before getting posted

So why can't you do the same with spammers that sign up and start spamming ?

 

 

 

 

 

[1001gear]

And the red flag flag so redundant reports don't happen.

[Bucksstudent]

Maybe if the first five posts from newbies had to pass across a moderators desk before publishing?

 

That's exactly what I did on two forums I ran. On the Glen Campbell forum I ran, I actually enabled a policy that new posters had to make three posts in the main section before they could have access to the full board. That helped weed out spammers and one-post wonders quite well, though a few turned a little irate about it.

 

Another feature I used on the R.E.M. forum I ran was making a troublesome member's posts invisible until I approved them. There was a guy who openly discussed his crystal meth habit and made inflaming posts all the time, but the majority of the board were forty-something females who felt sorry for him. When I polled them on if I should ban him, they all thought he was harmless, yet he was actively documenting his illegal activities and hatred of women. So, instead of banning him, I queued all his posts before they appeared on the board, which eventually made him angry (no one else was aware of this except for the other mods). When he turned abusive toward me, I changed his password and silently banned him for a few months. Not even the other mods knew.

 

Moderating a board is a rough job, and you sometimes have to do less than desirable things to keep the peace. I do not miss it.

[knotty]

 

That's exactly what I did on two forums I ran. On the Glen Campbell forum I ran, I actually enabled a policy that new posters had to make three posts in the main section before they could have access to the full board. That helped weed out spammers and one-post wonders quite well, though a few turned a little irate about it.

 

Another feature I used on the R.E.M. forum I ran was making a troublesome member's posts invisible until I approved them. There was a guy who openly discussed his crystal meth habit and made inflaming posts all the time, but the majority of the board were forty-something females who felt sorry for him. When I polled them on if I should ban him, they all thought he was harmless, yet he was actively documenting his illegal activities and hatred of women. So, instead of banning him, I queued all his posts before they appeared on the board, which eventually made him angry (no one else was aware of this except for the other mods). When he turned abusive toward me, I changed his password and silently banned him for a few months. Not even the other mods knew.

 

Moderating a board is a rough job, and you sometimes have to do less than desirable things to keep the peace. I do not miss it.

 

Sounds a bit like a covert dictatorship bucks, spoofing your fellow mods?

[Bucksstudent]

 

Sounds a bit like a covert dictatorship bucks, spoofing your fellow mods?

 

In a sense, yeah. I had a "democracy" where members voted on everything from board aesthetics, banning, certain policies, etc. The three other mods were elected by the members. However, at the end of the day, it was my board and I paid for the domain and features. If a member was being a pain in the ass, I consulted the mods, and I allowed a particular member to remain despite his drunken posts and outright harassment because the mods for some reason felt he wasn't a problem. There was another member who caught me on a bad day, so I queued all of her posts and disabled her private messages.

 

Again, I don't envy the HC mods and admins. They do a good job, and no one's perfect.

[6down1togo]

As dead as this place has become, I think they are happy to have anyone post, spammer or not.

[Ratae Corieltauvorum]

Even as a Mod, I see the Flags, but have no access to them. my minimal contribution now is that I og on ~09:00 Uk time, and glance down the first two pages.

[Ratae Corieltauvorum]

As dead as this place has become' date=' I think they are happy to have anyone post, spammer or not.[/quote']

 

That's not even close to the truth. I don't know who you are referring to as "they", but the people with "hands on" with this forum and the other is people like me, Phil, Dendy, Daddymack, and we're just interested in a decent forum.

 

You're out of order with that remark