Spam deletion?

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raevol
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Spam deletion?

Post by raevol »

Can we get the Korean spam cleaned out of the forum? It's been here for a few days. Also if we are short on Moderators can I get promoted to the task? I check the forums every day.
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psi29a
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Re: Spam deletion?

Post by psi29a »

I second this! Raevol for moderator. ;)

Throwing people out for being toxic, no problem... dealing with spam ALL THE TIME is really a time sink and honestly I'm tired. I get notifications more about spam than I do about people posting... which, I'm sorry to say, demotivates me from coming here. :/

I think we need a better anti-bot system in place, or make it so that new posters can't create topics for either a month _or_ after making 5 normal posts that aren't flagged for spam.
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lgromanowski
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Re: Spam deletion?

Post by lgromanowski »

Hi,
spam is cleaned, I've added raevol to the global moderators group. Regarding better antispam system - I'll check what can be added to current settings.
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raevol
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Re: Spam deletion?

Post by raevol »

Thank you lgro!
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Thunderforge
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Re: Spam deletion?

Post by Thunderforge »

psi29a wrote: 08 Mar 2018, 07:58 I think we need a better anti-bot system in place, or make it so that new posters can't create topics for either a month _or_ after making 5 normal posts that aren't flagged for spam.
I think that the second section is throwing out the baby with the bath water. My first post on this site was a new topic about questions on how to compile. I was interest in OpenMW right away, so being told that I had to come back in a month, or being told I couldn’t ask my question, would have probably made me lose interest in OpenMW. Thankfully, that didn’t happen.

A policy I could support is that users in the first week can only post one topic per 24 hours. That limits the scope of spammers while not unnecessarily limiting new users.

That said, maybe promoting raevol to moderator is enough (and I think he’ll do great!). If you need another moderator in the Western Hemisphere time zones, I’m happy to volunteer as well.
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DestinedToDie
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Re: Spam deletion?

Post by DestinedToDie »

I check the forum every day. Not that I'm big into moderation, but I might delete a spam thread or two when I visit.
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psi29a
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Re: Spam deletion?

Post by psi29a »

DestinedToDie wrote: 08 Mar 2018, 19:23 I check the forum every day. Not that I'm big into moderation, but I might delete a spam thread or two when I visit.
It happens in batches.. some days nothing, other days it is literally 20+... I check the site perhaps once an hour or so and jump on the spammers like white on rice. I'm just getting tired of it and was hoping for a technical solution to help reduce the work load.
Thunderforge wrote: I think that the second section is throwing out the baby with the bath water.
That's just hyperbole, don't be silly.

I admin two other (phpBB) forums and have implemented such systems as I've suggested above. The re-captcha system during account creation helps with bots, but the manual account creation that is then given to spammers is tougher to deal with. We eventually implemented a system where someone had to post at least 5 messages in existing topics before they could create their own topic. This helped a lot with shit-posting too. We have an introduction thread, generic question thread and a free-for-all thread and it worked out pretty well and newb friendly.

We tried the time based one (3 days) but spammers would just wait it out.

I would love to know what is done over @ http://forum.openscenegraph.org

FYI: What I suggest is pretty standard on phpBB these days (no mod necessary)
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtop ... &t=2096413
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Spam deletion?

Post by AnyOldName3 »

When I first posted here, it was regarding a really good sale for Morrowind (like €2.50 or something) that lasted a couple of days. It had to wait for moderator approval before becoming visible, so didn't show up at first. Two and a half weeks later, someone messaged me saying that the sale wasn't working for them, and it turned out that the post had only just been approved, making it useless and misleading. This was bad. If we're having our current spam problems, then I imagine that this rule has been removed.

When Retroarch released an update that killed touchscreen input on certain Android devices and no one else had reported the bug, I had to go through a huge rigmarole to set up a forum account there including a 30 minute tutorial on their nasty single-page-made-out-of-kilograms-of-Javascript forum software, only to find out that I could only post in existing threads if my account was less than a month old and had less than 30 posts. It didn't help that there was some reason why I couldn't find a good thread to hijack (either they didn't have a general questions thread or you needed a certain number of other posts before you could post there - I think it was the latter of these). This was an incredibly awful experience, but the bug was fixed within a few minutes of my post eventually getting approved.

On Dolphin's forums there was briefly a rule that required you to have a certain (achievable) number of posts before you could do a thing, and they rapidly realised that this was a bad idea after people started filling other people's threads with useless crap just to increase their post count. The change was rolled back (but there are still some forum sections where you can't create new threads without a post count of 1000 or something huge, but very few people would bother spamming that much).

Before implementing a software solution, you need to consider the potential drawbacks.
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lysol
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Re: Spam deletion?

Post by lysol »

AnyOldName3 wrote: 08 Mar 2018, 22:02 When I first posted here, it was regarding a really good sale for Morrowind (like €2.50 or something) that lasted a couple of days. It had to wait for moderator approval before becoming visible, so didn't show up at first. Two and a half weeks later, someone messaged me saying that the sale wasn't working for them, and it turned out that the post had only just been approved, making it useless and misleading. This was bad. If we're having our current spam problems, then I imagine that this rule has been removed.
I too remember that there was some kind of anti spam feature like this. I even remember this scenario.

I have to agree that while it is certainly effective with having limitations like these for new users, it does cause problems.
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Spam deletion?

Post by AnyOldName3 »

Something relatively simple like if you have a new account and you create a bunch of threads really close together they become hidden until approved by a moderator is unlikely to get in the way of most actual users, but would have stopped the Korean spam, for example.
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