Why isn't spam being removed?

[drmosh]

My favorite: when the guys bitching about spam don't bother to report it so we can clean it up.

I always try to report things when I see them, but when 60% of the front page is spam I really can't report every post, and wonder what the mods are doing

 

[technomancer]

I always try to report things when I see them, but when 60% of the front page is spam I really can't report every post, and wonder what the mods are doing

We're not compensated to do anything here, so while you "don't have time to report" the threads we're supposed to take time to go through and remove the threads one at a time (which is what the interface requires) in a speedy manner early in the morning on a week day? In all seriousness fuck you.

I was doing things clearly less important than ss.org like going to my job at 7:30AM local time.

 

[drmosh]

We're not compensated to do anything here, so while you "don't have time to report" the threads we're supposed to take time to go through and remove the threads one at a time (which is what the interface requires) in a speedy manner early in the morning on a week day? In all seriousness fuck you.

Christ, calm down. It wasn't an attack on you or any mod.
I've always reported shitty posts and spam, take your anger out on someone else. I am pointing out that when half the front page is spam, I cannot realistically report every post. Truth be told, I shouldn't have to. But that's not your or any other mod's fault, it's the admins.
I also don't know what the mod tools look like, neither am I a mod.
But thanks for the insult

 

[technomancer]

Thank you to those of you that are reporting these, it makes it faster to clean up than going through the forums and looking for them.

Alex does supposedly have a developer on the team now that is working on this. No idea if anything will come of it.

 

[Randy]

Don't you guys have a "one click clean and ban" button? other forums have those just for dealing with spammers, if not, is it a forum software thing or a "admin rights" thing?

Even still, it's a process. The old spammers used to have one account and make several threads at a time, so you could "one click delete/ban" and wipe them all out. All the spam since the XenForo transition has been a separate account, separate IP per thread, so if there's 20 spam posts, you need to delete each one individually. And that wouldn't be so bad but it's not "one click". It's 'view reports > view reported item > view content > mark as spam > confirm deletion" and every step opens the next one in a new tab, so you can have 4 or 5 tabs open by the time you clean one post. Imagine that multiplied out times the dozen+ spam posts I wake up to.

FWIW, I appreciate the people who are reporting the posts because it makes finding them a lot easier. In that respect it's a team effort between the posters here and the mods. And also FWIW, I wasnt always a moderator either and I got here BY reporting posts, so I've been there.

 

[TedEH]

I only ran a forum for a very short period of time, but we got overrun with spam at some point too. Solution was to change the sign-up process to make it harder to automate new accounts. I dunno what the signup process on this site is, but there's bound to be a way to add some extra layers to the signup as a prevention measure, if nobody is considering that already.

 

[bostjan]

Something like they have for ordering pizza online...

 

[couverdure]

My favorite: when the guys bitching about spam don't bother to report it so we can clean it up.

I actually do report them, every FREAKING time. This is particularly getting worse today because I saw 13(!) spam threads.

 

[technomancer]

Sorry guys we do what we can but Alex is the only one that can fix this.

 

[PBC]

Is it possible that there can to be a grace period for new users. For example, a user must cannot post at all until 3 days after account creation? Or some kind of regex so that threads with "Http" in the title can't be published?

You guys are doing what you can. I'll do my best to keep reporting.

 

[bostjan]

Is it possible that there can to be a grace period for new users. For example, a user must cannot post at all until 3 days after account creation? Or some kind of regex so that threads with "Http" in the title can't be published?

You guys are doing what you can. I'll do my best to keep reporting.

I mean, even an hour delay would probably cause most spammers to lose interest. The ones who push through a one hour delay, I imagine, would push through a 3 day delay.

There are a lot of filters and such to ferret out spam pretty effectively. I don't even think the "http://" title is the clearest indicator, necessarily, of spam, but reading those posts, there are a lot of words and a very specific nonsense sort of word choice that makes it very clear.

But, it'd take a site administrator to implement these sorts of controls, and I'm not certain that any of them would be fast to implement, given the new architecture, but I just don't know how the new architecture works.

 

[TedEH]

I mean, even an hour delay would probably cause most spammers to lose interest.

I don't think it would help much if the spam is automated. It's pretty trivial to have a spam bot wait an arbitrary amount of time before posting. It's much harder to get a bot through complicated signup processes though.

 

[bostjan]

I don't think it would help much if the spam is automated. It's pretty trivial to have a spam bot wait an arbitrary amount of time before posting. It's much harder to get a bot through complicated signup processes though.

Pretty much what I was thinking, even if that's not the way it came out. The thing about the spambots, though, is that, if they don't expect to have to wait an arbitrary amount of time, they won't. And most of these accounts are opening up and posting immediately. That could be used as a way to flag new accounts.
I'm all for whichever controls knock out some of the spam. I think the last twenty or so online accounts I created all required either email verification or captcha.

 

[Dredg]

What if we deputized a few users to act as spam hunters only?