How do you guys keep the spam level to such a dull roar? Is it that there are multitudes of you behind the scenes deleting stuff?
I frequent another vBulletin board, and they are inundated by spam posts. They do their best to delete and block as fast as it comes in, but there’s still an annoying amount. I think there are 2, maybe three people though doing the actual monitoring and moderating.
To register I think you have to now answer a horse-info based question (it’s a horse board and I’ve been a member there for umpteen years, not sure about new protocols), but they are finding that just about anything can be answered by a Google search. They could do more esoteric kinds of questions, but that might weed out new-to-horses folks who are looking for a board to ask questions and learn.
I suggested maybe a picture ID sort of question, but I don’t know if that’s possible, or if it would really help.
We do have a decent-sized moderating staff as well as posters who are diligent about recognizing and reporting spam. We also have a system that catches some spam posts and diverts them into a queue that only the mods can see. It doesn’t work on all spam, but it catches some posts that have been splattered across the web. And a few months ago we added a question to the registration process and I think that’s blocked some spambots. It’s a simple question that anybody should be able to answer, but the hope is that bots won’t be programmed to handle it. It’s hard to keep out a determined human spammer, but we’re good at getting those quickly.
We have at least a couple of moderators for each forum, so we generally have someone available to deal with spam except in the middle of the night. But I and probably most other moderators rely mainly on reports by posters, who are apt to see a spam thread or post before we do. The help is much appreciated. Getting to vaporize spammers is one of the main perks of being a moderator.
Just as a note, if you do report a spam message, post “reported” in the thread so others will know it’s already been flagged for attention by moderators. This cuts down on the number of duplicate reports.
Is there a way to modify the reporting feature to where the report button disappears if someone has already reported a post?
Or is it useful to know that a multitude of people find certain nonspam posts offensive enough to report the post? So you can know it’s not just one person with a grudge or something.
I moderate on another vB board and we have a similar spam catching system. The spam posts are automatically moderated so that they are invisible to the members, but we can nuke them from orbit. It’s not 100% perfect, but very little spam slips through, and our members are pretty diligent about reporting any spam that they do see. Still, the spam problem is terrible. We have a couple of hundred spam threads being posted on a daily basis. But, as Colibri said, banning spammers is one of the perks of being a mod.
Could you make the “question” part a bit harder for that region? Several layers of questions drawn from a large set, etc.? With a suitable delay in-between.
I’m of the opinion, but by no means an expert on spammers, but I’d wager the spammer population responsible for most of this would still get through. I think they’re real people, not bots. And, probably fluent in English.
They mainly do the “Watch NFL/MOVIES/TV SHOWS LIVE…” and such.
I do a lot of late night board reading, and generally, if I see spam, I’ll nuke it. It doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem during the night time, though we do get some spam flurries from time to time.
If I’m the first mod/admin on the board at say…6:30 in the AM(quite often I am), I get perhaps 3-8 spammers not caught since midnight. I know you are quite often up and get them, and idle thoughts is quite often up and gets them, but most of us normal mods work more of a daytime schedule.
Marley gets them starting early in the morning and going all day. Other mods get them as they get reports during the day.
The reason I get my share is they are posting from overseas(2am-8am) EST.
I was thinking of wasting their time in the interest of the public good. If it takes 5 times longer to set up an account and make a post from that zone, that’s 1/5th the number of such posts they could make. If more boards did this, then more would benefit (and rainbows would be made of cotton candy).
I know it’s a delicate balance, it really helps boards to make it easy for new people to join in but that opens the door to spammers. But if most spam is coming from certain IP address ranges, then hit those hard.
Again, that’s the problem. Most of them use the largest two internet providers in India. We have quite a few legit members from India. We have many more who lurk and read.
If they were very narrow static IPs, we’d do it. They’re not.
The horse board does have a big membership and a lot of traffic, and we do alert the mods to spam posts, but I think there’s just so much junk coming in they get overwhelmed. As I say, as far as I know there are only one or two people trying to stem the tide.
I know they are working on alternate solutions, so I’m hopeful we can at least slow the crap flow down a bit.
My definition of “night” is anywhere from about 10 PM (Central) on til about 6 AM. That’s when I’m on the computer the most. Sometimes I’m online. Sometimes I’m happily destroying other countries in Civ. I am generally not engaged in normal activities at any time of day or night.
I don’t think that we can make one protocol for making a new name for one IP (or a few IPs) and then have everyone else use a simpler protocol. However, I wish to state that I’m all in favor of cotton candy rainbows. As long as the cotton candy is FRESH.
It sounds to me as if the admins need to recruit a few more mods, and also look into getting some spam detection software. I think that the software has helped us a LOT, because we seem to get far fewer spammers. I’ll sometimes catch a spammer who is active, but the post won’t show up. The spammer tries to edit the post, in order to get it to show up. Then I come along and drop the banhammer. It’s a very satisfying feeling, something like squishing a mosquito just as she bites you. Before we got the software, a spammer might be able to put a visible post in each open forum. Even if the horse board doesn’t want the software, though, getting at least two more more mods in would probably help a lot. It’s very discouraging to sit down, go to the boards, and realize that you need to get rid of all this shit.
Yes, that’s what I meant. A random picture of basic horse related equipment or activity. If it’s not a stock photo from an online catalog, or labeled in any way, it should be pretty hard to search even using the image-search function.
