Spam solution?
 

Not sure about how the forum filters work but is there a way we can block new threads with "live", "stream", and the link pointing toward reddit?

Re: Spam solution?
 

Just keep reporting them.

Re: Spam solution?
 

Personally, I love the idea of being able to block people from posting their streaming stuff. Maybe doing something about the IP address instead of just getting rid of the account or post or whatever they do right now?

Re: Spam solution?
 

i also had the idea of blocking links to reddit...

one other solution I found was to not allow users with -10 posts to use links, since it's always a new account

Re: Spam solution?
 

I could have sworn that a few years ago, threads started by new accounts had to be approved by a moderator. Am I remembering incorrectly, or did something change?

(Note that I am not advocating increasing the moderators' already large workload, although this would likely help with the spam to an extent.)

Re: Spam solution?
 

I like the <10 post solution. It makes it much harder for bots to post. We could also consider introducing captcha for users with low post count, as people who actually want to post will be fine with filling in 5-10 captchas.

Re: Spam solution?
 

It would have to be a different type of captcha than is used for registration, because that is obviously not working very well.

Is it just me or are the titles becoming more and more believable.

Re: Spam solution?
 

I almost think the streaming is irrelevant and some nifty programmers wrote an AI or neural net (cough cough 900) to learn how to pick up on human language...

Re: Spam solution?
 

I don't think it is, but it's using buzzwords as clickbait to get people to look at them.

Re: Spam solution?
 

I agree with Sperkowsky that the titles are becoming more believable. I won't speculate as to whether this is a AI or HI driven. In recent weeks, I have taken to hovering over the title for new threads, especially those with exactly one reply as a personal spam filter.

Re: Spam solution?
 

I heard a suggestion on one of the previous threads that I liked

Somewhere on the registration page, have a hidden captcha. A normal human who fills out the form will leave it blank because they cannot find it, which is the correct answer. Any bot that combs the page will fill out said captcha and be denied.

Re: Spam solution?
 

I'd recommend the new reCAPTCHA since it is run by Google, and will always be updated to catch the latest of spam bots.

Re: Spam solution?
 

This restriction was in place at some point in the past. It may be that something broke it.

Re: Spam solution?
 

Could block any post from a poster with less than 10 posts and where the post is more than 50% hyperlink. Less moderation.

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.

Re: Spam solution?
 

Is the spam usually this heavy at this time of day, or is the problem getting worse? (see attached screenshot)

Re: Spam solution?
 

It comes in waves. Very heavy now. I suspect that when activity on CD increases, the spam bots specific to vbulletin can measure that and then target CD.

We spank them as fast as we can. There are several active mods.

Re: Spam solution?
 

Well its good that there are a lot of active mods then!

If this problem isnt fixed by build season this when the traffic goes up this will be one interesting place.

Re: Spam solution?
 

One of the other things to understand is that most mods don't have the ability to moderate every forum. So it is easy to delete the ones in the general or technical forums, but when they post in rarer forums like "rumor mill" we can't get them.

As I type this there is a spam post on the front page that I can't do anything about.

I think there is a technical solution to this problem, but I know that Brandon's time is at a premium. I would say that adding some mods or expanding the privilege of existing mods would help in the short term.

Re: Spam solution?
 

The spam also gets worse right before the start of big sporting events. Hence the uptick we've been seeing before that start of every window of NFL games.

Re: Spam solution?
 

Ahh that makes sense. Football's boring anyway.

Re: Spam solution?
 

My bad if I missed a reply to this but in late 2013 when i joined the team and created a CD account a moderator didn't have too as far as I can remember. Though when creating a new account there is a text box where you put a person's username; that person would be some one who recommended CD to you.(Not sure if it is needed to put one in the text box but it is easy to copy some one's username in a thread.)

As of a solution what if each person's first self made thread would have to go through the moderators before being posted. It would help if it were just spam, if it was an actual thread though the moderators would have to be quick in checking these posts in case they were important. Also can these spammers just make new threads? Or could they post in random threads? Otherwise the moderators might be getting a lot more emails if they can randomly post in these threads.

Plus I want to add if you do find a spam thread don't post in them. Just report. Otherwise the post will stay on for longer unless/until removed.

Re: Spam solution?
 

What if for new members trying to sign up, if you put in a referrer (with, say, 50 or more posts) and that referrer agreed to your signing up, in that you were legitimate, then you could be added to CD as an account, and if you didn't put in a referrer, then you would have to wait for a moderator to approve your signing up. For example if a user on "team 7" with a username a moderator couldn't identify tried to sign up, then the moderator would disallow the registration, or interrogate that user. If it was a person with an actual name, actual team, and other personal information, the moderator would simply approve the sign up.

The reason people post "Reported" in the thread is so that multiple people do not report them, preventing unnecessary email spam for the mods.

Re: Spam solution?
 

That is an awful lot of moderation to put on the mods. We all check in when we can or when we get notified. The current best solution is to just report it. CD is a great community. We want new users to be an active part of the community. A bit of spam can be tolerated.

Re: Spam solution?
 

I already this afternoon reported 3 non robotic related threads/post advertising the football game on Monday night football

Re: Spam solution?
 

So I am noticing a lot more of the spam posts as well. How do I report posts/new threads when I see them?

Re: Spam solution?
 

The little red/white triangle on the top of the post

Re: Spam solution?
 

Look at the top of any post, right side (in the orange bar separating posts). There are four icons. From left to right: Post # (AKA "view single post"), set of scales ("Reputation"), spotlight ("Spotlight" seen on the top of each page), and a warning triangle ("Report"). For reporting spam, click that "Report" icon and follow instructions given in the next window (often something about if there's any comments put them here).

Also for reporting, as noted, post with "Reported" either right before or right after you hit the report button--before is overall faster, as I recall.

Re: Spam solution?
 

Every piece I've seen starts in rumor mill. What if we did an experiment and closed rumor mill for a weekend and see if that fixes the issue? I'm not sure how much time it's take to class 1 forum for a weekend but it may work.

Re: Spam solution?
 

See Greg's post for why it seems like there is more spam in Rumor Mill. It sticks around longer, not that there is more of it.