High Volumes Of Spam At Certain Times Of The Day

[Macman45]

As the title says...This seems to be becoming the norm now...GMT 5AM-GMT 10AM that time frame sees the front pages spammed with all kinds of garbage. I report all I see, and I suppose it's a slack time on the site when US users are going to bed and European members are just rising. It is annoying though.

[AQUADock]

Thats probably because as you said its when the forum is used the least so there is less people to report the spam.

[Macman45]

Originally Posted by AQUADock

Thats probably because as you said its when the forum is used the least so there is less people to report the spam.

It's worse today...I have reported 26 and they are still rolling in.....Maybe we need a Mod on call I tend to be awake at the crack of dawn, and frequently find the forums overloaded with junk....I will persevere...I Hate spam

[costabunny]

Originally Posted by Macman45

It's worse today...I have reported 26 and they are still rolling in.....Maybe we need a Mod on call I tend to be awake at the crack of dawn, and frequently find the forums overloaded with junk....I will persevere...I Hate spam

Yep totally agree - I've put in a bunch of reports too this morning. (gives me something useful to do).

spammers do pick the crossover times as they know their posts are likely to be removed, but at these times they will be displayed for the greater amount of time; and thus potentially clicked more.

[OllyW]

Originally Posted by Macman45

It's worse today...I have reported 26 and they are still rolling in.....Maybe we need a Mod on call I tend to be awake at the crack of dawn, and frequently find the forums overloaded with junk....I will persevere...I Hate spam

I've been doing my best trying to keep up.

[robbieduncan]

Us moderators are volunteers so none of us are likely to want to be "on call". However we are geographically distributed to try and provide as good coverage as we can.

Please keep reporting the spam. It helps us

[Macman45]

Originally Posted by OllyW

I've been doing my best trying to keep up.

And doing a fine job...It's just they are created faster than I can report...If I could zap 'em they wouldn't stand a chance.....Well done

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Originally Posted by robbieduncan

Us moderators are volunteers so none of us are likely to want to be "on call". However we are geographically distributed to try and provide as good coverage as we can.

Please keep reporting the spam. It helps us

Oh I will.....When I was a Mod on a windows site years ago I had the nickname "Spamkiller"

It's not every day, but the past few weeks have been insane.

[OllyW]

Just a little tip.

You don't have to report every post made by the same spammer, we can get rid of them and all of their posts from a single report.

[robbieduncan]

Originally Posted by OllyW

Just a little tip.

You don't have to report every post made by the same spammer, we can get rid of them and all of their posts from a single report.

Another tip (not aimed at Macman45 at all as I've not seen you do this!):

Don't reply to spam threads or quote spam posts. Replying in a spam thread is not so bad: your reply get deleted with the thread but if you quote a spam post we then need to edit your post too!

[Macman45]

Originally Posted by OllyW

Just a little tip.

You don't have to report every post made by the same spammer, we can get rid of them and all of their posts from a single report.

Yes, I report the ones with the same usernames once, but these people selling shoes are joined by baseball spikes ( I know what I'd use them for) and football jerseys.

At least here people tend not to respond to them. On the site I worked on the used to post "Go away spammer" etc, which kept the ads at the top encouraging the creators.

I know how hard it is...I have the ( very old) tee-shirt..

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Originally Posted by robbieduncan

Another tip (not aimed at Macman45 at all as I've not seen you do this!):

Don't reply to spam threads or quote spam posts. Replying in a spam thread is not so bad: your reply get deleted with the thread but if you quote a spam post we then need to edit your post too!

See below....That was my biggest gripe on the Windows site...People did just that....Pointless, and we never could stop it.

[SandboxGeneral]

Another thing about the volume of spam that comes in is that during the day in the US, there are more of us mods online and we zap an awful lot of it that the general membership never sees.

It's a non-stop battle of spam coming in all the time.

[mrsir2009]

There's a ton of it coming through right now

[costabunny]

I guess its been discussed between admins and mods before but maybe having manual sign up approval could be trialed? That would slow em down?

I know captcha and email confirm were designed to do this but it seems nowadays spammer are more sophisticated.

Its a constant struggle between us and them.

Just a few pennies of my opinion thats all

[mrsir2009]

Originally Posted by costabunny

I guess its been discussed between admins and mods before but maybe having manual sign up approval could be trialed? That would slow em down?

I know captcha and email confirm were designed to do this but it seems nowadays spammer are more sophisticated.

Its a constant struggle between us and them.

Just a few pennies of my opinion thats all

What about not being able to post links until your post count has reached 25 or something? That'd deter them.

[costabunny]

Originally Posted by mrsir2009

What about not being able to post links until your post count has reached 25 or something? That'd deter them.

Yes thats not too bad at all - balance restrictions to prevent abuse with ease of access for genuine users Bunny approves

[mrsir2009]

Originally Posted by costabunny

Yes thats not too bad at all - balance restrictions to prevent abuse with ease of access for genuine users Bunny approves Image

Might be a little annoying for legit member who want to post links, but I guess if they really need to they can just post the bare URL and people can copy n' paste

Another idea, although it's probably a bit high-tech to be implemented easily... Since the spammers always post threads with titles highly unrelated to the forum, those threads could be wastlanded automatically - For example: A thread called "adidas f50" in the MacBook Pro forum could be recognised easily by computer software as totally unrelated. That'd get rid of most of the spam without anyone having to do anything and without it hurting the user experience of new users.

[simsaladimbamba]

What about reducing the wait time for reporting posts to less than 30 seconds, maybe 5 or so. Sometimes it comes in handy when reporting numerous SPAM posts, as I just did in an old thread (I combined the five SPAMMERS in one report)?

[Macman45]

Originally Posted by simsaladimbamba

What about reducing the wait time for reporting posts to less than 30 seconds, maybe 5 or so. Sometimes it comes in handy when reporting numerous SPAM posts, as I just did in an old thread (I combined the five SPAMMERS in one report)?

That would be a great help....I frequently see multiple usernames and a lot of spam...Waiting 30 seconds can be irritating. I don't think the 25 post count is a bad idea though...These spam post's are often Bot generated and hard to keep up with.

[stridemat]

Originally Posted by Macman45

That would be a great help....I frequently see multiple usernames and a lot of spam...Waiting 30 seconds can be irritating. I don't think the 25 post count is a bad idea though...These spam post's are often Bot generated and hard to keep up with.

From memory I don't think it is possible. The report time is linked to some other VBulletin setting which shouldn't be changed (or something like that ).

[Macman45]

Originally Posted by stridemat

From memory I don't think it is possible. The report time is linked to some other VBulletin setting which shouldn't be changed (or something like that ).

Yes, it's not a huge deal as I always wait...Although there is no way to tell, I wonder out of curiosity just how much money these people manage to fleece? You'd have to be a little dim to actually buy anything from them, and I must admit, most members here do not respond to the post's....either that, or I get there before they can..

[Comeagain?]

Originally Posted by stridemat

From memory I don't think it is possible. The report time is linked to some other VBulletin setting which shouldn't be changed (or something like that ).

Post reports are tied to the email flood check. It could obviously be changed, but would require custom coding, or a compromise.

[mrsir2009]

Originally Posted by Macman45

Yes, it's not a huge deal as I always wait...Although there is no way to tell, I wonder out of curiosity just how much money these people manage to fleece? You'd have to be a little dim to actually buy anything from them, and I must admit, most members here do not respond to the post's....either that, or I get there before they can..

I wonder what ethnicity the spammers are too, as their english seems absolutely atrocious.

[designs216]

Originally Posted by Macman45

As the title says...This seems to be becoming the norm now...GMT 5AM-GMT 10AM that time frame sees the front pages spammed with all kinds of garbage. I report all I see, and I suppose it's a slack time on the site when US users are going to bed and European members are just rising. It is annoying though.

I was thinking you were going to say spam intensified around the time of lunch breaks instead of spammers trying to grab clicks in the middle of the night. I guess that's a bigger window.

[kylera]

If you need additional human spam monitors for different time zones, I would be willing to volunteer as I am based in East Asia

[tigres]

Why don't you just set the post count to x, and not allow new signups to create a new thread until they have x reply's in other threads?

Seems it would smack them down quite quick.- at least the new thread spams, which appear to be the biggest culprits.