The spammers who turn up on a multiple-times-daily basis with their threads titled “exciting phone!”, containing links to streaming something-or-other. The SDMB should do something about it.
It’s not difficult to implement a solution so that new members can’t post links - I’m fairly sure that off-the-shelf configurations exist for vBulletin to control exactly this problem. it can be done, and doing it would be a net good, so it should be done.
I know the spammers are not humanity’s biggest problem, and the threads themselves are a trifling annoyance, and are always swept up by moderators very efficiently… BUT…
The spammers are most likely being paid on piece work - it’s quite probable that they have to provide evidence of success of posting their link - this can probably be completed within the typical short lifetime of their threads. if their threads never actually hit the board (i.e. if it went into a hidden moderation queue or something), they wouldn’t get paid, and the world might get a tiny bit better.
It’s mostly “spammer” not “spammers”. It’s one particular a-hole from Bangladesh that causes most of this.
We do actually have a spam filter here already. It does a pretty good job of filtering out spammers, but this particular a-hole is also pretty good at evading spam filters. He is also a very determined little a-hole. I have literally banned every name he registers with every few minutes before he can even post, and have had to do this for hours on end before he finally gives up.
As for preventing new users from posting links, he is already more than aware of that trick. He doesn’t post links. He makes posts without links and then edits links in afterwards. He also makes dummy posts that don’t contain links, to evade fancier spam filters that don’t let new users post links until they have a certain number of posts that don’t contain links first. If you see spam posts that are just copies of existing posts, that’s what he is up to.
We block his IPs, and he just comes in from other IPs. We block the temporary e-mail sites he registers from, but then he just finds different sites to use. And we can’t block domains like outlook.com since we have legitimate users registering from those domains.
He’s a frustrating little a-hole. I’ll give you that.
It might be worth mentioning that it used to be about three persistent little a-holes who were responsible, but the other two have finally given up. In other words, we are actually winning the war, just extremely slowly.
I think that they actually do a very fine job here. In fact, they should work for AT&T because I get a thousand times more spam from robo calls from a service I PAY GOOD MONEY for than I do here! :mad:
You know, this could be my very first Pit rant. ATT&T can do that to you.
There was actually a period of several days when there was almost no streaming spam posted. I thought they all had given up but then the main spammer came back.
As engineer says, in the face of a spammer who is willing to invest almost limitless time for little reward it’s difficult to find an effective solution. We’ve tried the standard methods and it just becomes a game of Whack-a-mole as he switches to another strategy.
As I’ve posted here before, I can’t figure out why this guy is willing to invest so much time in posting this stuff here, where it gets deleted so rapidly. Spam is supposed to be worthwhile because many copies of the same message can be sent out for virtually no cost. But with this guy, every single message is different. It must take him at least a minute or two to make a new name (even if it’s gibberish), new email (he always uses a new email), a new thread title (the thread titles are mostly different and his versions actually say something, although sometimes he copies old therads), register, post a message, and then edit that out to post links (which also often differ between threads). Even if parts of the system are automated that must still take way more time than the average spammer spends.
One odd thing is that now he doesn’t even try to get off multiple posts from the same username. When the streaming spammers first appeared, they would keep posting spam as many times as possible before that name was banned. Now if for some reason a name isn’t banned at once, he makes a new name to post another message rather than trying to get off several with the same name.
We still get “normal” spam but only a few posts per day. These are “one-and-done” and they don’t try again after being banned.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I am so sick and tired of robocalls on my cell phone; I have blocked dozens and hundreds of them and still they come. Sigh. I actually don’t see very much on the board so you guys are quick to banish them. AT&T never banishes anything.
No need to worry. I’m back at the gym, I’m riding again and I’m returning to coaching in the fall.
You guys will just have to take up the slack. What little gets through.
Like Col, above, I am astounded he keeps it up. He CAN’T be making much - if anything - from it. I can’t imagine it’s salaried work. It must be performance based and I don’t think there can be much performance.
OK, fine, it’s developing world and low income can go far. I get that. But there’s a big difference between putting the work in for a low return and putting it in for NO return.
Maybe the SDMB is his spam testing lab. It’s populated enough to be useful and has a good active moderator to member ratio. So anything that works here for a while will be great on a board with less attentive moderation.
He loses money on every post, but makes it up in volume.
Seriously, there are folks in ordinary business that just aren’t making it, but keep stubbornly refusing to give it up. Maybe this spammer just has the same sort of mentality. Or, heck, maybe it’s turned into a bizarre hobby of sorts, and he’s grown to enjoy the game of trying to create as many accounts as he can. Yes, it’s weird, but there are seven billion people in the world, and it’s not out of the question that one of them would take on that particular weirdness.
He’s definitely automated at least some of it, but there are some parts which could theoretically be automated which he apparently hasn’t.
By the same token, we’ve automated part of our process of fighting spammers, but there are still some parts which could theoretically be automated but haven’t. Well, aside from our robot mod in beta testing, but ecg isn’t open-source.