Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

Honestly, this is getting ridiculous.
Is there anything else we can do than just reporting and getting the thread removed?

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

When I was a new user and I made my first post, wasn't there something like "your post may not appear until moderators approve it"? What happened to that?

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

Well, it's a little controversial, but we could require team numbers.

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

Is there anyway someone can track the IP adress of where these posts are coming from? Just an idea. Don't know if it can happen.

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

Team 180 might object...;)

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

As the Olympic Games are currently occurring, these will probably be posted with increased frequency. Be on the lookout, everyone!

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

Yea I had to do the same, is that still something new users need to do? (also replying on this post makes people think this thread is a valid thread, maybe this is not the place to have this conversation)

I'm not sure. For me it didn't apply and my first post was immediate.

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

I'm pretty sure I did the same.

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

I sent a message to Brandon today. The issue is that most of the forums that get hit with heavy spam have very few mods. Like rumor mill only has 13 mods where the general forum has 31. The amout of spam across the site has increased, and the mods do the best job they can, but the Spammer find the sub-forums that don't have many active mods.

also many mods have disabled the email notifications for spam because of the volume which also doesn't help the problem.

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

Happy to mod if he wants me to. I've only been around 14 years....

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

Reported!

Just kidding. :p

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

(emphasis mine)

Keyword "may".

Not to give them any ideas, but they'd eventually outsmart it, which would be worse.

Possibly, but I think they're in different places from different spammers, so it wouldn't stop all of them.

Definitely. It's pretty obvious if it's spam though, as the titles are nonsensical incomplete sentences. Don't get me started on the grammar...:p

That's it? I heard that you need to have maintained an active account here for at least 30 years...

Kidding!

The spam is becoming a bigger problem, but even though the mods aren't always able to remove it quickly, I'm not sure how effective it is for the spammers. We all know it's spam, and therefore don't click the links, thus not benefiting the spammers. Is there an email account confirmation? I can't remember. They're obviously bypassing the CAPTCHA...what if no hyperlinks are allowed in first posts or if the account is fairly new? Spam accounts rarely post more than once.

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

Rather than continue discussion in a spam thread, let's use one of the many prior threads about spam prevention.

Everything mentioned here has already been discussed in those threads. Keep in mind, CD currently runs a very old version of vBulletin (the forum software). CD will be moving to a new software at some point:

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

Edited in. They've gotten around that one long ago.

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

While I was visiting family in India, I had to access CD through a VPN until I got back (I didn't want to wait for Brandon to let my IP through). I assume any spammers are doing the same.

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

Another possible way to at least hide the spam is if a post is reported by say 3 people (pick any number you like), it is then automatically hidden until a mod does something with it. You could also make it only for threads started by accounts less than x days old, with less than x posts, etc. to limit abuse towards legitimate members. This system would enable the threads to be at least temporarily dealt with in a matter of seconds to minutes instead of hours and removes the time sensitivity for mods and I feel like Chief Delphi is capable of not completely abusing a system like this (famous last words).

Re: officers dragging a woman off the
 

Can Vbulletin even do this?

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Note: I deleted the original spam post that started this thread, and moved all of the subsequent discussion to a separate thread.

Spam
 

I have seen several different ideas about how to combat spam, but as far as I can tell, nothing has been implemented. I'm not even sure that there is someone maintaining the actual website (as opposed to content). I remember seeing a post awhile back about all the changes that were going to be made to the website, but I can't tell if any of those were actually implemented. Does anyone know who owns and maintains CD?

Re: Spam
 

Chief Delphi is maintained by Brandon Martus and a handful of volunteer moderators. It runs an older version of vBulletin, and was intended to move to something newer called "Flarum" [1] once it exited a beta. However, we don't have a timeline for that. Recently though, CD *did* gain HTTPS as a security precaution.

In the meantime, perhaps making users have a valid team number and name to register would be a good idea (ie they enter their team name and number and if they match like on TBA it'll let them in?)

[1] - http://flarum.org/

Re: Spam
 

then what's to stop all of them from just putting in actual numbers of FRC teams? What about students on pre-rookie teams, or people not currently on a team?

Not a bad idea, except I think it would need to be limited to users with a post count over a certain number - 100 maybe? Otherwise I can see threads disappearing left and right as a new form of "trolling".

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

In addition, is there a restriction on new accounts reporting threads? Because, in theory, they could then counter-spam by removing the legitimate content.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

There definitely is a potential for abuse, but I don't think it would really actually happen. Most (not all) controversial posts are not the start of a thread, so I think the only case where we would see abuse is blind trolling, not in response to controversy. I really don't think there are many people on CD who engage in that type of trolling, but I am not a mod, so I don't know. However, there are plenty of ways to reduce the chances of abuse even further. I already mentioned some, and you mentioned one as well (though I would just use the same criteria for being able to give real reputation), and there are plenty of other safeguards that could be added. All of these spam accounts (and also real-person trolls) follow very specific patterns, so it is possible to have very specific criteria for what is considered potential spam.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

What about people like me (and many others, Ether and Looking Forward) who aren't affiliated with a team? Sure, we could be grandfathered, but what about future legitimate non-affiliated people?

That said, while I don't have a specific fix I do know somebody who might. I'm also an active member of Badcaps.net forums and we used to have awful spam issues but the admin (who I know personally) made some changes and now we legitimately have no spam. They do run Vbulletin, and a somewhat old one at that. I know recaptcha was involved at some point but otherwise I have no idea (as I'm no longer a Mod over there).

If it would help I could see what he did and let the Brandon know as potential fixes. (iread: Brandon or a mod PM me for details).

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

That's definitely a concern. The way I'd go about it would be to only force that upon registration, and allow it to be changed as always after registration. However, the reCAPCHA would definitely work better.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

I also have experience Moding/Admining forums, so if my help is needed, I would be more than happy to help.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

I'm not sure requiring team numbers and even names would work. While it may be effective for a while, the spammers will eventually outsmart it. It would be worse to see spam posted by a "team". If they can put a location in, they could put in a team name and number.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

One possible solution would be to prevent users with less than some small number of posts (5? 10?) from editing posts. These threads are made by users posting a thread with some nonsense text but no link, then going back and editing the thread to include the link.

A lot of the problem with "require information at registration" thing is that sometimes, actual humans are the ones mass creating spam accounts, and they can do some quick reading to figure out what information they can put in to pass initial scrutiny.

I do not think anything good can come from having threads automatically removed after a certain number of reports or anything like that. Spam threads are annoying but not such a big deal that we should open the forum up to abuse like that.

If there's anything I can do to help CD with these spam threads, lemme know.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

I think the problem isn't just preventing the links edited in, but the nonsense threads in general. If it's possible to prevent these threads altogether, we don't have to worry about just the hyperlinks.

I like your idea though! Maybe if there was a way to tie that into a long-term solution, I'd be game for it.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

The problem is entirely the links; the only reason you see nonsense text at all is as a mechanism to get links on the page. If they cannot put links in threads, spammers have no incentive to spam, and won't do it. It is the entire reason they are doing this in the first place.

It's just really difficult to prevent "nonsense threads", but still allow a legitimate poster to create an account and post a thread right away. It is difficult to balance accessibility for legitimate new users with blocking spammers.

Also mentioned: CAPTCHA - one problem with this is that spammers are sometimes humans.

How about a recaptcha or something similar when editing a post before it will let you submit it? If it would be an annoyance we can have it go away after a certain amount of posts (maybe 20?). What does everyone think?

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

I want to mention that I've gone back and looked at some different spam accounts that I had reported in the past: They have team numbers and cities already entered.

The accounts I looked at had #0000 as a team number, but one account has it's location as Las Vegas, and another as San Francisco. So either the spam bot is able to enter this in, or the two accounts I looked at were run by humans. This proves that they have the ability to enter things into these fields. After all, it is required.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

I'm going to repeat my earlier comments here for sake of continuity.

The spammers are here not because they think there's a chance in hell we're going to click those links, but because CD has very good page rankings at Google, et al, and the Google crawler is often here picking up new threads. Thus the links that come from these pages confer a substantial (for a spammer) amount of pagerank to the linked page.

If we cut off that page rank flow (eg force links to contain "rel='nofollow'" - details here) their incentive will dry up quick.... The bad part is they might not notice it right away, and the links that we DO want to give credibility to, eg team pages and resources, won't have that.

Hence my suggestion was to rel="nofollow" any link for anyone below a certain post count, something substantial, like 25-50+.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Same. I fairly recently and never have had any kind of warning like that.

It is a vBulletin option (creating a promotion for all new users into a usergroup and then moderate all posts from the usergroup) so it probably used to be enabled on this forum. I don't think the vBulletin feature was depleted which would mean it was just disabled from CD...

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

I really think there should be something to handle pictures being posted in spam threads instead of just links. That makes it a bit crazy.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

More moderators? I feel that that's a need in general. For example, there are plenty of current moderators that haven't signed on since 2015 and even earlier.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

No pictures until moderator permission or X number of posts. Simple.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Not quite.

How the spam posters operate:

-Post thread with semi-random content.
-Edit content of post with links to what they're trying to get you to look at.


So... maybe I've got something that could work:

No links/pictures in posts until a certain post count (let's call it 10) is reached, or without moderator approval, and no editing of posts until a certain post count is reached (call it 10 as well). And, if it can be done, a "greenlight" button that would allow the moderators to bypass the requirements on a user-by-user basis.

And more mods.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Something now really does not to be done. Earlier today one of the posts had a pornographic image. Its one thing with links but that... is bad.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Agreed. It's been getting really bad lately.
Moderator applications time?

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Yep.

Just a thought: What do people think about students serving as moderators or maybe in a position like a moderator but with less power?

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

It seems strange for that to be lumped in with the "spam" it has no link to some other website.

In general that's the purpose of spam, to generate views/interest in a specific service in which whoever is offering that service makes money. 90% of the spam at least is some live stream to a sport. This specific post doesn't follow this trend at all.

(disturbingly) An image that is uploaded to a free and public image hosting website is almost definitely a member of the website who posted that image in order to get a reaction/some ulterior motive.

Pretty saddening if you ask me.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Personally, as a student - against. I don't think that students will have the responsibility to do it properly. Granted, even some adults aren't great moderators, but the chance that a student does not-so-good things is higher.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

As the resident student with the "we can do it too attitude" I am not too sure about this. Not because of how good the students will do. I think a student can mod just as good as adults. But, because of the backlash from others.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Some imageboards I frequent have positions called janitors who only deal with spam/illegal content. They actually seem to work pretty well.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Some of them have entered 0007 or another number. At least one entered FTC as its competition. And the titles are getting more believeable. There was one "about" build season and another "about" motors.

I wouldn't be opposed to student moderators. I think that they should just have restrictions on what they're allowed to do. As others have said, there are some students that would probably be great moderators, and some adults who wouldn't.

That sounds like a good idea. Maybe if student moderators could only "hide" posts, then adults would review them and decide whether or not to delete them?

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Probably a stupid question: why are mods limited to certain boards? Just today, Greg Needel mentioned that he sees the posts, but can't do anything about it because he's not on the Rumor Mill board. I feel like unrestricting it would cut down on the spam quite a bit.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Different mods have different skill sets, if you will, as well as different interests. So rather than having every mod have full access to all the subforums, different mods work different subforums (or rather, different sets of subforums). It's a classic management trick: if you need someone with X skill, make sure that you've got at least Y (3-4) people with that skill, AND make sure that everybody in the relevant group has some Z number of skills. That way, you're covered.

Problem is, usually there's 1-5 mods on at any one time, but there's something like 30 subforums. And some mods only cover one or two subforums, while others cover a lot more.


If I was Brandon, I might think about conducting a moderator survey to see if anybody wanted to expand their coverage into some of the less-moderated subforums, or if a couple of moderators needed to be added.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Perhaps I'm wrong, but the skills of a moderator remain fairly similar across the board, no?

Why not just have people everywhere, and only the people in their expertise remove things that aren't relevant to the board? e.g. if I'm an EE I could see a ME post in the EE forum and move it.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

So here's the other part of the question, and what I was actually getting at:

Let's say you're an EE, and you're "all business", and you're not really interested in much outside of EE. What forums are you going to ignore?

--Looking at the technical side of the forums, Curriculum, Pneumatics, and CAD are probably on that list; KOP is probably going to only get half an eye of attention. Most of the others have SOME relation to EE.
--In the competition section of the forums, the Awards and Rules/Strategy subforums jump out as stuff to pay attention to, mainly for stuff pertaining to EE. Maybe some of the rest gets some attention if your team is mentioned.
--And in the "Other" section... yeah, there's a reason that it's got that name. Not much there if you're only looking for technical stuff.

So if you're an EE who really doesn't care much about non-EE stuff, are you really going to want to "patrol" the 2/3 of CD that you stick your nose in when someone forgets to put the EE stuff in the proper subforums? Right, didn't think so. Particularly since CD allows you to set up what you see in the Portal to ignore whatever forums you want to ignore (or, to be more accurate, to only show what you want to show).

I think that's more the reason that the mods only work a few forums each--that's just what they want to focus on.


Here's another suggestion, that might be easier (or harder): The "Mod of the Watch". Basically, for a given period of time (say, 1-2 hours), one trusted moderator has full mod power in all forums, and is "on call". If something crops up and other mods can't handle it due to subforum boundaries or dealing with a "hot" thread, the "Watch" moderator deals with it, at least enough to get it out of sight for review. (I can just see it now: half the mods on CD calling for my head for this one...:p)

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Patrolling isn't needed. What's needed is for people to check reports for something like the blatant spam on rumor mill.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

+1

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

But if they don't LOOK at the rumor mill, why would they want to get the reports?

See, that's what I'm trying to get at. There's a lot of people that don't like Chit-Chat, Rumor Mill, and some of the other forums. If those people are mods, do they want to moderate stuff they don't normally want to look at? (Or, if you were a mod, would you?) I really don't think so!

The Rumor Mill (since you called that one out in particular) has 13 moderators and one webmaster (look at the bottom of the forum's page). I can vouch that I've seen recent activity from at least three of the mods (deletions in Rumor Mill), and posts from some others--so maybe half of them have been online in the past week. Most of them are on Central time, so that'd give some best-guess as to when they'd be online (and, you know, deleting threads). Many of the moderators use "Invisible Mode", so telling when they're actually online is nearly impossible. Sure, reporting sends emails--but the question of whether email is being checked is an open one. (I tend to get notifications of email, but whether I pay attention is another story--and I'm not a mod anyways.)

I think having more moderators in "spam-target" forums is a good thing--but I'm not sure that expanding the permissions of the current moderators would go over quite as well with those moderators.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

The porn thread, for instance, has been up since 3:30 PM Central today. 10 hours later, it's still up. Regardless, my solution to your issue of mods not reading the reports of separate sections is either a) send reports with "spam" in them to everyone or b) make all reports flood into a central inbox. I'd prefer b, but I'll take what I can get in order to fix these issues.

As a non-mod speaking out his rear: generally, we don't need more moderation. It's the spam that gets to be an issue.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

It's really an artifact of when they were added. Anyone who got added a long time ago only got given subforums that were relevant to their skillset/knowledge base. At the time spam wasn't even an issue and it was mostly about moderating the actual forum.

Those that got added (relatively) recently were given almost every subforum because of nonstop spam. The older mods probably need to have their subforums expanded and there probably need to be some new ones.

I understand your complaint, but it just isn't relevant. I am a moderator, but not in the rumor mill forum. I do not get emails reporting that spam, because I cannot moderate it. If I go into the moderator subforum and read the reported post threads I would see that someone reported it, but I still can't do anything about it since I have no moderation privileges in that forum. The issue is there's like one active user who can actually moderate posts in that forum and the other 12+ don't read CD/barely come on CD anymore.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

As I said before, if you and your team would like more moderators, I am more than willing to help out. I am on here multiple times a day, so I would not have that issue. Let me know if you would like your help. I will PM Brandon as well.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

I believe that (the segregation of moderators, so to speak) is what Ollien is trying to change, hence the relevance.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

That may be what he wants but what he actually asked for was all moderators to be alerted to the presence of spam outside their "preferred" forums...which won't do anything because they'd have to hunt down someone in that forum who actually has privileges to moderate it.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

I should have been more clear. Asid61 is correct. Moderators should be given access to all boards. What I was talking about was Eric's notion that even if their privileges were to be extended, they wouldn't read the reports anyway.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Please do not put words into my mouth. (And, while you're at it, check your grammar--either you're missing a critical negative, or your post makes no sense.)


I was stating that mods might not WANT to have mod responsibilities in forums that they don't care much about, and might put up a bit of a fuss about that.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

I'm sorry, I made a typo. I didn't put words in your mouth, however. You did state that moderators who weren't interested in a board wouldn't read the reports. This solves that problem.

Whether or not they want to is a technicality.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Again, you are putting words in my mouth. If this post does not make it clear, PM me.

There is a big difference between not wanting to read something, and not reading something. I did NOT say that moderators wouldn't read the reports. I DID say that moderators who weren't interested wouldn't WANT TO read the reports. If it helps to clarify the difference, I'll bet that there's at least one textbook that you don't want to read (because you aren't interested in that class, or for some similar reason)--but you read it anyways (at least, I hope you do). I know I'm that way about some topics.


And I'd rather not have a moderator who doesn't at least have a passing interest in that forum topic doing the moderation. Then we get the discussions about how Chit-Chat and the Rumor Mill need to be removed vs the cluttering of General with those same topics because they have no home now (because the mods decide to put it out for discussion). Yes, there has been discussion on those lines before.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

I do understand the distinction. What mainly lead me to believe what that you you were saying was that moderators would not take care of the reports for certain boards was:

We can continue this conversation in the PMs, but I do want to make sure the air is cleared. This lead me in the direction of thinking that you were saying that moderations would not check the reports for those sections. As such, I offered solutions to the problem I thought you were stating.

The situation is simple: I misinterpreted what you were saying. If it felt I was putting words in your mouth, I'm sorry.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

At this point all mods should be given access to all forums, as mentioned above 99.99% of the moderating these days is getting rid of SPAM and not keeping people inline (like it used to be).


Also, I don't personally get email anymore for ANY forums because the volume of email got insane. I normally keep a tab with CD open most of the time and check every hour or so. It helps that by boss is cool with that :cool:

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

We also have a new issue. It appears the spammers, particularly those posting porn have inspired actual people, or are hacking. Someone who is an actual member of the community recently posted something with a spam-ish title and an inappropriate image inside. So I have no idea if this person really hopped on the train, but I'm inclined to believe they were hacked, which creates the aforementioned whole new issue. Unless this has already been happening and I was unaware?

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Which once again was posted using a free image hosting service. One would think that someone spamming as a legitimate spammer would have a location in which they were already hosting such images.

If it's real people doing it, the solution to the spam problem is easier said than done.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

I agree, if the moderators would accept, that giving moderators the ability to moderate site-wide would be a help. It may also be worthwhile to add some "spam-only" moderators to help with the load as well. I know the vB tools don't allow for that segmentation, but it would have to be on the honor system.

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Getting a Stack Exchange Q&A style design would be a huge improvement for the signal to noise ratio.
The best Answers get pushed to the top and more moderation controls.

Here are a couple potential software platforms:

0. Stack Exchange style - AskBot - https://askbot.com/
1. VEXforum style - (esoTalk) http://esotalk.org/ or successor Flarum

Re: Constant Spam Threads
 

Brandon Martus is planning on switching to Flarum when it comes out of beta.