BUY PASSOVER HIGH QUANDRY PANDA DIVER LICENSE



  • Seriously, can't we filter out the spam somehow? Surely the spammers must have a finite number of IP addresses...



  • We've had this same discussion a hundred times: I don't even think CS allows you to block by IP. Besides, there are a lot of spammers out there. Your best bet is to use the "Report Abuse" link, instead of just posting a new thread. New threads don't get spam deleted.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    We've had this same discussion a hundred times: I don't even think CS allows you to block by IP. Besides, there are a lot of spammers out there. Your best bet is to use the "Report Abuse" link, instead of just posting a new thread. New threads don't get spam deleted.

    The spammers are registering ten new accounts a day and posting one or two threads with each. It's always about counterfeit identification cards, and there are never any links in the posts, just keywords. Hundreds of keywords. Human moderators can only do so much.

    If we can flag down Alex, I'm sure IPs can be blocked (by the Windows equivelent of iptables or whatever). Does CS have some kind of "new users get put into a moderation queue until one of their posts is approved" thing?



  • @Ben L. said:

    Hundreds of keywords. Human moderators can only do so much.

    There's no way I know of in CS to block keywords. Besides, most spam is deleted almost instantly, especially if you report it.

    @Ben L. said:

    If we can flag down Alex, I'm sure IPs can be blocked (by the Windows equivelent of iptables or whatever).

    I think having Alex manually enter firewall rules to block spam is a waste of his time.

    @Ben L. said:

    Does CS have some kind of "new users get put into a moderation queue until one of their posts is approved" thing?

    No. I've complained about this deficit before. New users have to be approved my a moderator, but it's not easy to tell if a user is going to end up being a spammer (especially when so many of you have spammer-sounding names..)

    I think the only real option is to delete it by-hand. We've been through waves of spammers in the past. Eventually they give up and go away.



  • I don't see how this could make sense the biggest botnet in this article had 30 million ip addresses.



  • @Chame1eon said:

    I don't see how this could make sense the biggest botnet in this article had 30 million ip addresses.

    I think these are copy-paste spam, not from a botnet, but I still don't think it's practical. The last 5 spammers had, wait for it, 5 unique IP addresses. They all were on separate netblocks, from the looks for it. Then when you consider they could just connect via one of thousands of open proxies out there, and it starts to become unworkable. It would be more manual process that wouldn't fix anything.

    The only automated way I can see to delete spam posts easily in CS is to have a gmail account that is subscribed to every forum. Each post will go to the account, then a bot can check the spam folder and delete any posts in there. Of course, that's a lot of work just to make this work, and if Gmail suddenly decides all TDWTF posts are spam, we'd have a mess on our hands.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Ben L. said:

    The spammers are registering ten new accounts a day and posting one or two threads with each.
    Really? Are you sure you aren't exaggerating there?@Ben L. said:
    Does CS have some kind of "new users get put into a moderation queue until one of their posts is approved" thing?
    We thought so from how something was named, but when we tried it, it didn't work as expected (i.e. at all.)



  • I think the issue for me is that I subscribe to the RSS feed - I don't post much, but I read near enough everything that comes into the sidebar.

    These artificially bloat my feed reader, and is really annoying - if I didn't spend so much time going through marking all the spam as read, I might have time to post more often - and I've got some good ones I've been meaning to post.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @theheadofabroom said:

    I think the issue for me is that I subscribe to the RSS feed - I don't post much, but I read near enough everything that comes into the sidebar.



    These artificially bloat my feed reader, and is really annoying
    I subscribe by email to all the boards, and there really isn't enough spam such that it "bloats" the amount of mail I get - does the RSS feeder automatically detect spam and multiply it 100-fold or something like that?



  • Nope but the filtering isn't anywhere near as advanced


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @theheadofabroom said:

    Nope but the filtering isn't anywhere near as advanced
    What filtering? I've trained my mail filters to never touch any subscription mails from this site - 'spam' or not (otherwise I'd miss them and wouldn't be able to moderate them.)



    The only thing that does happen is a rule that SpectateSwamp's messages are automatically marked as read so I don't have to read his inane drivel, but beyond that I get an unfiltered feed from this site.



  • I should obviously bow down to your superior e-reading abilities - when it comes to email subscriptions to mailing lists I frequently search for is:unread $SPAMKEYWORD and mark everything that matches as read. This evidently isn't an issue for you, but it is for me - maybe because I read most of my email and rss on my phone rather than a computer


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @theheadofabroom said:

    I should obviously bow down to your superior e-reading abilities
    Or maybe you could stop blowing things out of all proportion. Your choice.@theheadofabroom said:
    when it comes to email subscriptions to mailing lists I frequently search for is:unread $SPAMKEYWORD and mark everything that matches as read.
    Perhaps you should get an email/spam filter that you could train to do that for you so you don't see them to begin with. Just a suggestion you understand. Or you could come on here and gripe and moan that the world isn't to your liking and that everyone else should change to suit you.



  • I thought that was the purpose of this forum?



  • @PJH said:

    @Ben L. said:
    Does CS have some kind of "new users get put into a moderation queue until one of their posts is approved" thing?
    We thought so from how something was named, but when we tried it, it didn't work as expected (i.e. at all.)

    "Not working at all" and "working as expected" are synonyms for CS.



  • It would be nice if CS supported poster hell, or fake bans. "Ban" the spammer, but the spammer still thinks he can post here. He sees his posts and threads, but nobody else does. I think Jeff Atwood had an article about this concept once but I'm too lazy to search for it.

    But, this being Community Server, it's probably a moot point.



  • @mott555 said:

    It would be nice if CS supported poster hell, or fake bans. "Ban" the spammer, but the spammer still thinks he can post here. He sees his posts and threads, but nobody else does.
     

    So the spammer, not affected by social feelings of rejection or loneliness, continues to use server resources.

    What the fuck? That's not poster hell, that's ddosing yourself.



  • Well since I'm being hypothetical anyway, put lots of Thread.Sleep(5000) calls in the code if the user is a spammer.



  • I don't get it...


    1. How much overlap is there between "people who need to go on the run with fake documents", and "people who like mocking the technologically inferior"?

      Also...
    2. How much overlap is there between "people who want to get into nice countries with fake documents", and "people who like mocking the technologically inferior"?



      I'd generally assume that most of the audience here is in a reasonably well paid job, regardless of their location, and so has a considerably lower likelihood of being involved in the kind of criminality that requires such documents. That includes Nagesh and his ilk.


  • I'm sure it has something to do with Google indexing and search results. If Google gets the spam indexed before the mods here remove it, it helps some site get higher page rankings.



  • @mott555 said:

    I'm sure it has something to do with Google indexing and search results. If Google gets the spam indexed before the mods here remove it, it helps some site get higher page rankings.


    But WHICH SITE? They don't put any links anywhere, unless they have something in one of the broken CS profile fields.



  • @mott555 said:

    I'm sure it has something to do with Google indexing and search results. If Google gets the spam indexed before the mods here remove it, it helps some site get higher page rankings.

    I know this is going to come as a shock, but spammers aren't very smart.


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