Recent Spam

[ScorchedEarth]

Captcha is virtually useless nowadays.

It stops 99% of spambots.

[aander91]

Do you have actual stats to back that up or did you just pull that out of your ass?

Granted, I'm just making an estimate based on personal experience but I'm not so bold as to actually make up a number.

[raynebc]

Too easily abused. The occasional immaturity of these forums would result in people reporting posts just for the sake of 'trolling' and hiding posts from the entire forum when they don't like a certain someone.

That's why if people false report posts, they can get warned and then banned. Solves that problem.

Bots are getting better at solving captchas all the time, and there are probably warehouses full of people that get five cents per hour to do nothing but solve captchas.

[ScorchedEarth]

Too easily abused. The occasional immaturity of these forums would result in people reporting posts just for the sake of 'trolling' and hiding posts from the entire forum when they don't like a certain someone.

That's why if people false report posts, they can get warned and then banned. Solves that problem.

Bots are getting better at solving captchas all the time, and there are probably warehouses full of people that get five cents per hour to do nothing but solve captchas.

Woot. More workload for the mods and it doesn't solve a damned thing.

Captcha's stop a lot of spambots. I don't understand why we don't have one and then moan and groan when we get spammed.

[Metallicaholic666]

Too easily abused. The occasional immaturity of these forums would result in people reporting posts just for the sake of 'trolling' and hiding posts from the entire forum when they don't like a certain someone.

That's why if people false report posts, they can get warned and then banned. Solves that problem.

Bots are getting better at solving captchas all the time, and there are probably warehouses full of people that get five cents per hour to do nothing but solve captchas.

Woot. More workload for the mods and it doesn't solve a damned thing.

Captcha's stop a lot of spambots. I don't understand why we don't have one and then moan and groan when we get spammed.

we do actually...

[raynebc]

Woot. More workload for the mods and it doesn't solve a damned thing.

Guess you don't quite understand that it takes a human to determine with certainty whether or not a post was reported legitimately. Handling reported posts is entirely within the scope of the role of a moderator, and there probably is not a more elegant way to deal with the spam except to make it harder to create accounts.

[Belisario93]

here's a question: do we require e-mail activation for new members? I could foresee that stopping a good deal of spam. I don't remember if we do or not, as I've deleted the e-mail that gets sent when you register, likely a long time ago.

One thing we need to ask ourselves is this: what do other forums do to control spam? I've been to larger, more popular forums, and many of them I never see a line of [advertisement] spam. One thing I noticed is that these sites also have a larger team of active mods as well. But "hiring" more mods would only help if they are hired such that the total mod activity spans over a full 24 hour cycle. Not to mention, from my perspective anyways, there are next to 0 people that would fit the job.

I like the "hide reported spam posts" idea, but this would also require a "24/7" mod team. See above paragraph.

One of the things I don't like about making the registration more difficult is that many times a human is involved somewhere in the spam process, either in the registration process or in posting the spam as well. This is why CAPTCHA is not fool proof. However, are there any systems similar to CAPTCHA that we haven't tried yet? Based on what I've seen CAPTCHA is very common for forum registration, making it a higher priority to work around than other methods.

That's my 2 cents. Feel free to agree with it, disagree with it, question it, preach it, like it, dislike it, be confused about it, be undecided about it, misinterpret it, set it aflame, laugh at it, freeze it, eat it, or any combination thereof.

[acrox999]

Too easily abused. The occasional immaturity of these forums would result in people reporting posts just for the sake of 'trolling' and hiding posts from the entire forum when they don't like a certain someone.

That's why if people false report posts, they can get warned and then banned. Solves that problem.

Bots are getting better at solving captchas all the time, and there are probably warehouses full of people that get five cents per hour to do nothing but solve captchas.

Woot. More workload for the mods and it doesn't solve a damned thing.

Captcha's stop a lot of spambots. I don't understand why we don't have one and then moan and groan when we get spammed.

Welcome to the INTERWEBS where stupid people gathers to break the CAPTCHA system. I've been on many forums and CAPTCHA doesn't solve a damned thing. CAPTCHA did stop a lot of spambots, in the old times. There are a lot of people who are far more intelligent than the CAPTCHA devs, they could break the system easily.

Now,
Who made CAPTCHA? Human. Who made spambots? Human. HUMAN is the only way to stop them.

EDIT : Huh, you're banned? Then what is my post for? Grow up, be more mature, stop being arrogant, stop being a troll, etc., etc., bla, bla...

[Rapt0r]

Wow, I missed something awesome. CrushedSoul banned? Duck yeah.

So it seems the general consensus here is we need more mods/mods to be more active in responding to reports.

[amak11]

Wow, I missed something awesome. CrushedSoul banned? Duck yeah.

So it seems the general consensus here is we need more mods/mods to be more active in responding to reports.

like more mods ever solved anything. Just need better ways to circumvent spam. IE, harder activation methods or even temporarily closing registration until we have a better method to prevent it.

The only one that isnt very active is Blcakfate. I see tibiziak on during the day sometimes and stump is a night owl. Actually I dont see Death_au on too often aswell.

[Rapt0r]

>mod being online != being active.

Someone earlier pointed out mods being online but not responding to reports and leaving spam threads up. I've also noticed this on a few occasions.

Closing registrations is a retarded idea and solves nothing. It's not like this is destroying the forums.

[aander91]

Tell me again why more mods won't solve anything? If you can't seem to stop the mess, then having more people to clean it up will certainly help.

[raph666]

When it comes to spam, there are indeed many solutions available. If all of them can help, none are definitive and absolute solutions. Currently we do use captcha, email registration confirmation and "are you human" custom profile fields.
Yes there's still spam on the boards, but if I've seen better spam management on other forums, I also saw worse. The problem is pretty "average", not meaning we won't try to take care of it but that in the end, it's just spam. Could we use more moderators? Maybe. Could we use more anti-spam modules? Maybe. Is it necessary? Maybe. Is it critical? ...
We're working on something and we'll let you know when/if we roll this out. In the meantime, please continue to report the spam posts/topics like you always did. We appreciate your help.

[nwru]

Oops. Wrote this a few hours ago and forgot to submit...

Thought: is the spam really THAT bad? In the past week, there have been about 10 spamming accounts that have made it through our registration form with recaptcha, email verification, and word censor with blocker. They're an eyesore on here for maybe a few hours and then they're gone forever.

I'm probably the only one who has worked with email spam filtering. The sad truth is that some spam will always get through unless you employ someone to wade through everyone's email. Employees will complain about 1 or 2 spam emails a day, but are a bit humbled when I show them the 500-1000 spams they DIDN'T receive that day thanks to me =)

Still, we're looking into the "Spam Team" idea. It would only decrease the amount of time the spams are visible to everyone.

[aander91]

It certainly isn't terrible, but more than that, in certain cases floods of spam marks the death of a forum. However, your posts clearly show that the staff is still plenty active and have no plans of abandoning your posts.