What happened to the forum? > SPAM

[wesley123]

@Caito: De-indexing the forum is not going to happen. Search engines bring 45% of daily visitors, and a large part of that is to the forum.

So then these users come on the homepage and have to press the forum button to get there, not that hard and as an bonus it also cancels out the 'brain dead' from the forum.

[strad]

I don't know how many of you have operated a web site but it is a huge time consuming pain in the ass. There is no easy fix. What is a real shame is that they make money by doing it..and think it's working for a living.
I hate em

[Caito]

@Caito: De-indexing the forum is not going to happen. Search engines bring 45% of daily visitors, and a large part of that is to the forum.

So then these users come on the homepage and have to press the forum button to get there, not that hard and as an bonus it also cancels out the 'brain dead' from the forum.

But what I believe Tomba is saying is that of the 45% that get to F1T using search engines, a large part of it is because they find a forum thread, post or w/e, rather than an article from the main page.

[Steven]

@Caito: De-indexing the forum is not going to happen. Search engines bring 45% of daily visitors, and a large part of that is to the forum.

So then these users come on the homepage and have to press the forum button to get there, not that hard and as an bonus it also cancels out the 'brain dead' from the forum.

Actually, google indexes page content, so to get everything on the forum indexed without allowing the forum to be listed, I'd need to copy ALL forum content to the main page. You can see that is quite impossible.

[Richard]

There are two matters here. Firstly blocking the posters before they post. Second is to be able to quickly remove the spam and user if it appears.

This might be fiddly to code, but how about sending a thread to quarantine if it gets more than 3 spam reports from general users. Any user account with a thread in quarantine is then suspended.

[Just_a_fan]

@richard_leeds

I had a similar thought this morning. At least that way the users can do some of the initial spam moderating.

I wouldn't have quarantined it though, just say: "any thread where,for example, 5 users of good standing (being a user with e.g. 1000 posts) flag it as spam gets deleted".

We just want something that doesn't add ever more daily effort on the mods.

Either that or have a "spam mod" team who have mod powers restricted to just being able to quarantine a thread. That way there could be 100 spam mods helping to keep the forum clean. Auto delete any quarantined thread 7 days later unless a genuine user contacts the proper mods to ask for reinstatement.

[Steven]

I want to add that recently we're also blocking user registrations with email addresses registered on temporary email services. I didn't know before they existed, but exampls are yopmail.com and guerillamail.com

90% of recent spammers used emails from these domains, so they are blocked.
If you know more of these services, let us know!

[Richard]

I was meaning the account used to create of a spam thread gets quarantined.

I notice that the "report post" only allows single use and then anyone else reporting spam is told the post has already been reported.

The simplest fire fighting would be to allow a number of trusted users (by invitation) the rights to suspend an account on the agreement that it is only used for spam fighting. That would automatically hide all posts made by that account?

Also the mods can always see deleted posts and even previous edits, so any mistake could be corrected.

[strad]

What gets me is that they get what..50 cents each time they do this? Sad little shits

[Pierce89]

I was meaning the account used to create of a spam thread gets quarantined.

I notice that the "report post" only allows single use and then anyone else reporting spam is told the post has already been reported.

The simplest fire fighting would be to allow a number of trusted users (by invitation) the rights to suspend an account on the agreement that it is only used for spam fighting. That would automatically hide all posts made by that account?

Also the mods can always see deleted posts and even previous edits, so any mistake could be corrected.

+1 I can't stand these little primary school pricks
Wow I wasted my 700th post on some little spamming @ssh&le

[strad]

Parasites,,That can eventually kill the host. Too bad we can't just show up at their house one day.

[donskar]

@richard_leeds

I had a similar thought this morning. At least that way the users can do some of the initial spam moderating.

I wouldn't have quarantined it though, just say: "any thread where,for example, 5 users of good standing (being a user with e.g. 1000 posts) flag it as spam gets deleted".We just want something that doesn't add ever more daily effort on the mods.

Either that or have a "spam mod" team who have mod powers restricted to just being able to quarantine a thread. That way there could be 100 spam mods helping to keep the forum clean. Auto delete any quarantined thread 7 days later unless a genuine user contacts the proper mods to ask for reinstatement.

I agree with this. Let long-time members help out.

[strad]

A registration process where you have to copy a set of letters helps get rid of the automated ones, and a registration where the Moderator/s have to process the application , that is get an e-mail to activate the new account, takes to much time for the basic spammer like we have been seeing. The more complex you make joining the more it stops them.

[myurr]

A registration process where you have to copy a set of letters helps get rid of the automated ones, and a registration where the Moderator/s have to process the application , that is get an e-mail to activate the new account, takes to much time for the basic spammer like we have been seeing. The more complex you make joining the more it stops them.

It also provides a barrier to entry for genuine users though. Question is do you think the community on this site is large enough or do you want to encourage new registrations?

Adding a captcha to the registration form isn't too bad, but a lot of these spam services are employing real people (e.g. Amazon mechanical turk) or using tricks (such as displaying the captcha on a different site that people want to access, like a porn or torrent site, and then using their answer on the original site) making the captcha worthless.

You could try asking questions, like in text asking the question "what is six times seven plus three". Or "which is not an f1 team: McLaren, Ferrari, Bob". By having a large set of questions that are unique to your site then you can beat the automated solutions, but it's time consuming to develop and then maintain.

Sharing the workload with the userbase is probably the best way forward. Include a captcha on the registration form just because it's so easy to do and it will weed out some of the sapm, but then allow users to moderate the threads and posts. Limiting this to users with 1,000+ posts still lets you tap up a large number of users on this site and is a large barrier to entry to anyone wishing to abuse the system. Can have a variety of rules like 3 spam reports from 1k+ users and the thread / post is flagged as a priority for the mods and the posting user has their account suspended, 5 spam reports and it's automatically removed.

Also if you really care about SEO and Google then check out http://schema.org. Pretty much every SEO company on the planet has missed this one but it's the new standard for semantic markup within web pages.

[Richard]

Killed 3 spam topics in their tracks today. Hopefully no one even noticed they'd arrived.