Excessive spamming on CD

[demosthenes2k8]

It's OK, Taylor, size isn't everything.

Ontopic, I feel like having a report function for PMs would be an excellent idea, but feel like kramarczyk is overreacting. If they're a spammer, then most likely they're sending messages out in bulk, so multiple people can still report them. However, if a message is reported that's not spam, (maybe someone is arguing through PM?) then that one report would block that user from the site.

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by squirrel

The member list does not appear to have a "date joined" sort...if so, you'd probably find a lot of spammers among the newest members?

Using the members advanced search, you can search for members joining after a certain date. You can also sort by join date.

I did that yesterday and found 26 of the 52 people who joined in the last 5 days were obvious spammers. This does not count the people who were banned by other moderators during that time period, so it seems that >50% of new members are spammers.

That does seem better then email, where 90% of all email is spam.

[JohnBoucher]

Has anyone received more than one spam pm?

[EricH]

Nope, just one here.

[Karibou]

I'm kind of impressed that I haven't gotten a spam PM yet. Maybe because I haven't been posting a lot...

Does anyone know if this is just a huge problem here, or are multiple vBulletin forums being attacked?

[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by Karibou

I'm kind of impressed that I haven't gotten a spam PM yet. Maybe because I haven't been posting a lot...

Does anyone know if this is just a huge problem here, or are multiple vBulletin forums being attacked?

No other forum I use has had this issue.

[Bharat Nain]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

I did that yesterday and found 26 of the 52 people who joined in the last 5 days were obvious spammers. This does not count the people who were banned by other moderators during that time period, so it seems that >50% of new members are spammers.

Perhaps an enhanced user registration system should be used.

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by JamesCH95

No other forum I use has had this issue.

I'm on a few forums, and the spam attacks go in waves. CD isn't the worst, but it also isn't the best.

Originally Posted by Bharat Nain

Perhaps an enhanced user registration system should be used.

It depends on whether the spammers are computers or not. If the vbulletin captcha had been broken, I'd expect many more spammers, not only here but on other vbulletin forums. There is also the NoSpam! verification question which asks FIRST related information. It's unlikely someone would program a computer to break just CD's questions.

That makes me think these are actual humans doing the spamming (or at least the registering), and makes an enhanced registration system much more difficult.

I think it would be better to focus on some of the things in the following thread, to make the spam less useful and harder to get started with. http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...247#post972247

[JamesCH95]

Some forums I have registered for require a waiting period while an admin/mod checks out all of the information you have supplied. This sort of manual selection works very well.

[Chris is me]

I'd really feel uncomfortable if the CD registration experience became intimidating for a "good faith non poster" - i.e. someone registering to send a PM to a user about their robot or whatnot. Spam is annoying, but not so annoying that we should make our user experience require background checks.