Responding to spam posts ...
Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)
Posts: 23,514
I'm really sick and tired of people in this forum who post to spam threads! Why encourage them? For heavens sake, just flag the thread as spam and move on. Your comments only encourage the spammers and serve no constructive purpose! Cripes, people, what are you thinking?!!!
-Phil
-Phil
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Oh wait...
I flagged a couple. Then realized it was an avalanche and gave up.
Now...
Isn't there a simple way that first time posters can be moderated? Surely it is simply a matter of holding the post until a moderator can check them. This wouldn't really inconvenience anyone and would stop these spammers in their tracks. It wouldn't really affect any genuine first time poster since they would have to wait anyway if they posted when the forum was quiet and the moderators were away.
Hello!
And how does one go about flagging those annoying microcephalic postings as such? I did for example write an appropriate PM to Publison regarding those dolts, but that's all.
An avalanche indeed! 23 of them in fact!
All swept to the place they belong now.
I then hit the down vote twice, not sure if it registered as such.
Anyway, a spammer with a couple of dozen new accounts open could always up vote his own spam.
Yes... probably I can understand... I'm still fighting with switching from a 1024x768 notebook screen to a 1600x900ish one with higher DpI...
Sorry Phil, frustrated with over 100 spam emails that I had to sort through just before logging on the forum. Won't happen again.
As it was my post that you originally responded to (I think), I'll take a moment to address this. I am not encouraging anyone. The spammers are not targeting the forums because people reply to their posts. They are targeting the forum because the registration and posting can be easily scripted/automated. I think it's fairly safe to say that the spammers are totally unaware whether people are posting to those threads or not, as no human is doing the posting to start with.
Incidentally, I do mark them as spam. And I really wish that something could be done to the forum (moderating new posters, registration captcha, marking spam removes the message until reviewed, flamethrowing robot that automatically hunts down the spammer, etc.) so that we don't have to deal with the spam in the first place. It is frustrating. And, in this case, I decided to not be frustrated about it, and instead made a joke of it. You apparently did not find humor in it, or maybe you were already frustrated by the presence of the spam. Either way, I believe your concern about encouraging the spammers by replying to their posts is misplaced.
The way to fix this is to pre-moderate the first post or two of any new member. However, this can be frustrating for new users who have a legitimate question, and is a special concern for any company trying to use their forums for customer service. The alternative, possibly requiring an addin for this forum, is to pre-moderate first posts but only apply to disallowing links.
You can trust the Moderators to keep on top of this issue. (And two of the three Moderators are not paid Parallax employees).
I second Seiarth's suggestion about the flamethrowing hunting robot.. make a global task force of it. I would support a kickstarter campaign if there's one..
-Phil
On a series of groups I manage on this activity's former hosting place, I see such stuff that I've been tempted to turn in my card for each of them so many times I've lost count.
Typically when new members join a specific group, I draft a message to the list listing what the list discusses most of the time, and what we'd like to hear about. From there I also add what one might be facing in his new job. And as it happens the mainframe environment is turning stranger and stranger as it gets older.
I actually did toss out one bozo who refused to realize that the group manager, me, has the first authority to sign him up, and the last one, to throw him out. Now that happens perhaps once in a big oops, and that thankfully has not happened. However let's make this the last word on this subject.
Moderators should have an alarm bell that sounds every time a first post from a new registration occurs.
They can then wake up, slide down a pole, in their pyjamas, to the lair where they keep their PC and deal with it.
I'm sorry I did not even see the posts in question. It was the wee hours in the morning and our European sharpshooter got them all. I was just two hour behind, (5:00 AM).
Most aren't one-timers, but they seldom check the spam posts they've left. In most cases it's the same group of people doing this. They're paid to leave X spam posts, and what happens after doesn't concern them. Since most don't speak English, or speak it poorly, it really doesn't matter if there are replies.
The forum already doesn't give their posts page rank, as all the links are nofollow (in fact, too many are nofollow, even ones to internal pages -- Google doesn't really to like this and considered PR shaping grayhat, but that's not the subject here). However, they probably don't know that, and they're just leaving the posts because they've done a search and discovered this site uses a forum they can target.
Having to manually look up IPs is time consuming. There are some tools for rejecting or pre-moderating based on country or browser language, but none are fool proof. The smart ones will get around this by using proxies. Still, every tumbler in the lock counts.
As nothing is 100% effective at this, moderators do a wonderful job at cleaning up the small amount that makes it through. They are also proactively preventing what else they can on an as-needed basis.
Please appreciate the work they do, and continue to flag any spam content you see. It will be removed as soon as possible.
If you would like to make a suggestion to webmaster about spam-prevention, please email directly to webmaster@parallax.com.
Thank you.