Cannon Spiking the spammers

[Touko White]

How do we get rid of this excessive spam?
Just reported three of them now.

They're very likely to be bots, so I suggest a solution like the honeypot method (adding an extra field which bots will fill out, because they render HTML itself), auto-IP-banning them if you happen to fill in that - if they start to recognise hidden fields as hidden, then it might be worth just visible the box and saying 'DO NOT FILL THIS IN'.

Another method is banning new users from posting links for seven days or so or some other retarded restriction to stop them. Some of the bots likely put links in their signature so no one notices anything, but engine still recognise it and indexes the URL better, since that is the point of it other than to annoy people.

If it's humans we can't really do anything about it, though.
There's some good suggestions on this page, actually, although this deals with trying to stop human (kitchen) spammers it can be applied to bots more easily: http://pigeonsnest.co.uk/stuff/crapstuff/vance-miller-kitchens.html (and it's quite interesting to read it as well, although there's a lot of excessive swearing in it)

A good idea to fuck them up is to apply a word filter on users with less than x posts in URLs, which messes up their spam post...

Maybe there's some shit in the user agent string which might be detectable by the board.
~Cammy White

 

[daxtsu]

Just report them and move on (and don't reply to their spam, even if it's a status update, because that will still bump it to the top of the Recent content list!).

 

[Touko White]

Just report them and move on (and don't reply to their spam, even if it's a status update, because that will still bump it to the top of the Recent content list!).

Yeah, I just don't think the mods need to be wasting ten minutes every day banning random spammers.
Didn't know replying to status updates would bump it up, either.

Since their main tactic seems to be spamming statuses, blocking them would be a good idea, but I'm not sure.

 

[Pedeadstrian]

I'd imagine, if there was a convenient, fool-proof (or at least semi-fool-proof) way of blocking spammers without hindering actual users in the process, the mods would have done something about it by now.

 

[The Catboy]

We've actually had this thread before.The issue isn't the security though. A lot of them might not actually be bots, but actual people who are paid to spam. Which in that case, no amount of security will fix that.

 

[Touko White]

I agree some are bots and some are humans, we need a method to stop bots in particular. Does this site have StopForumSpam on it, though? Of course, proxy servers can be used to evade that, but there's also ways to block proxy registrations, although I disagree with messing people's privacy up.

No, I wasn't suggesting there weren't any exploits, either there is probably a way to tell if they're bots, is that they instantly post the crap, while humans will click page per page, and in the logs of who's viewed what, they'd have clicked to go to a random thread and spam their shite.

 

[funnystory]

I personally don't think we should add things like cloudflare. The spamming is really minimal for the size of the site and I have seen forums where you can't even post because of their excessive anti spam measures.

 

[Touko White]

I personally don't think we should add things like cloudflare. The spamming is really minimal for the size of the site and I have seen forums where you can't even post because of their excessive anti spam measures.

CloudFlare isn't that great anyway, though.
I do think some boards do over-do the anti-spam measures, though.

 

[Edrian]

I just don't think the mods need to be wasting ten minutes every day banning random spammers.

While I can agree with that if it's overly-excessive, it is typically a moderator's duty to ban spammers

In regards to the post, spam will always be an issue. As members, the best and most reasonable thing to take care of this problem is by not bumping spam (A thread I read just a while ago :3) and simply reporting the spammers.

A security measure would be nice, if there was one that is effective enough :\