Re: Spam solution?
 

Is it possible to increase the amount of moderators? How many are there now anyway? I feel like there are a lot of trustworthy mentors on here that have had an account for 8 years+ who aren't moderators but could be trusted as moderators.

Re: Spam solution?
 

I would be more than willing to help out. I am a moderator on many different sites as well as hosting my own for a few things.

Re: Spam solution?
 

I'm not sure I'd trust myself as a moderator--just sayin'.

That being said, here's the full list: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showgroups.php (from the list of all the forums, click the "Forum Leaders" link). I count 49, not all of whom are necessarily very active (and not all of them have moderating responsibilities in any given forum).

Re: Spam solution?
 

I wouldn't mind helping out as well, especially if it would help to reduce the amount of spam on CD and improve the overall user experience. I've had to battle spam-bots in the past while maintaining my own teams website.

As for a mechanism to detect spam without moderator interaction, I wonder how difficult it would be to automatically hide/delete/quarantine a thread after a certain number of users report it as spam? This could be implemented in a php script that scans the database for threads that have been reported excessively. A cron job could be set to run this script every so often, completely automating the task.

In theory, there should be very few false positives, if any. There could always be some type of appeal process if there was a false positive.

For preventing the spam in the first place, it probably would be best to somehow upgrade the capatcha that is used on the register page. The Google ran reCAPTCHA as mentioned above would probably be the best, as it is constantly improved.

Re: Spam solution?
 

The current wave of spam all posts a very specific type of link:

www.reddit.com/SPAMHERE

Anyone familiar with Reddit knows that 99% of reddit links will come from a specific subreddit, eg: www.reddit.com/r/frc


While one option would be to prevent new accounts posting links to any site on reddit, a more refined option could be to simply block new accounts from posting links that don't point to a specific subreddit.

Obviously this is a temporary solution, and only fixes the symptoms of the spam-bots, so to say.


On the other hand, I personally have been enjoying the quirky titles it posts...

Re: Spam solution?
 

Just out of curiosity, it there any known reason as to why people spam on CD?

Re: Spam solution?
 

As a moderator I can add a little info here...
When someone reports a post, I get an email notification as do other moderators. When I check my email I will go to the linked post and delete if needed. I will then use a feature of this board to delete the user so that same user can never post again. There are several of us that are on at similar times. I know that John Boucher and Gary Vostol and I are usually on early mornings. (I get to work at 6 AM and John and Gary have usually done some clean up before I get on. They are on Eastern time.)
I alerted Brandon a while back that spam was at an increase. It seems that when he had released India as a valid area, the spam increased. India has FTC teams and we hope that FRC will start there as well. That was behind the decision to open up that area.
As to the spam itself, this is similar to junk mail. The people behind the onslaught work on what it will take to get some one to pay up. In junk mail, those folks believe 100,000 mailings to get ten or less customers is valid. Without moderation, we know the posters will begin to flood the forum on a logarithmic scale. With everything in place, we are seeing only one or two posts from each poster.
I also use a site for research if I suspect the user is valid. It is http://www.stopforumspam.com. By entering the user screen name, you can see if this user has been reported and where the location of the ISP might be.

Re: Spam solution?
 

So It's suspected that a computer based program is spamming? Not kids from FRC that just are bored and want to "have some fun"? Just wondering. Thanks

Re: Spam solution?
 

I would make that computers and lot's of them.

Re: Spam solution?
 

Or someone from a third-world country who is being paid 14 cents an hour to see how many spam posts he can make.

Someone has evidently found a back door to CD, and is exploiting it.

Re: Spam solution?
 

They aren't allowed to make a new post with links. However, they post without a link, then edit to add a link.

Re: Spam solution?
 

That's pretty clever.

Re: Spam solution?
 

They're evolving :yikes:

Re: Spam solution?
 

I'm going to guess that the edit process is automated since vBulletin has a known interface.

The link goes to Reddit so most "check the link for spam" won't flag it. It goes to a reddit sub-reddit (think forum) that the guy runs. It's a post in the subreddit, but it's been deleted. It still exists in the reddit database, but does not show up in the subreddit. Unless a redditor knows the message ID, they are not going to be able to easily find it. But since the poster knows the message ID they can still get to it.

Bonus, because it's a subreddit, they can create their own Cascading Style Sheet, this lets them put the "advertisement" for the final site in as a huge clickable item.

Long term fix is for Reddit to do a database delete of the message record, instead of marking it deleted but still making it accessible.

Yes they are. It's very scary what these guys do to create clicks. I have a boat blog that I finally just turned comments off, even with the spam software I was getting about 20 posts a day.

If the world could only harness that energy we would solve world hunger, cancer and be celebrating our 5th anniversary of a colony on Mars. :rolleyes:

Re: Spam solution?
 

I don't know if this is feasible--or even desirable--but...

Would it be possible to disallow edits (other than deleting the post) for the first X posts for a user?


The idea would be to buy a little bit of time for mods (and others) to spot potential spam posts before the link is edited in, and proceed to delete threads and/or block the user.


The problem is that it doesn't give "clueless rookies" a chance to edit posts, thus preserving their moment of "cluelessness" on the internet for quite some time.