First, great job on removing that spam so quickly, but I have to wonder:
The recent spammer did reuse the title of “A non-Communist Russian Empire and WW2” from the thread in Great Debates. AFAICR it has not been the first time. I have noticed before that duplicate threads do happen from time to time also to regular posters but by mistake. I wonder: will it be too hard to add a feature to automatically prevent the reuse of thread names?
I think would make it hard to make mistakes like that, but more importantly now, to also make it harder for spammers to confuse posters.
I don’t know if there’s an easy way to prevent duplicates (I kind of doubt it) but I don’t think it would be worth the trouble.
Exact duplicate titles are a rarity in the first place. Most spam titles are still semi-random nonsense. It’s much more common to see titles that are duplicates except for a word or two or a misspelling. These of course would not be caught by the system. I actually think these are mistakes, but if we set up a system to stop exact duplicates then they would just post minor variants. That’s what they often do now with usernames and emails.
Sorry to be a bit critical, but you do need a more robust response to spammers, many spam threads are allowed to exist for too long before they’re deleted which only encourages spammers.
Actually, while it would be nice to enlarge our current anti-spam tools, the current crop of spammers are not in any way deterred by the short period that their threads remain. We have one spammer, (or one crop of spammers), who are busy submitting spam even as their threads from a minute ago are being deleted.
I know the chances of such a thing being implemented here are slim to none (and looks like slim’s slipped town) but on many boards you’re not even allowed to make new topics until after already posting a certain number of times and or a certain period of time after creating your account. Something like you have to have posted 10 times and have had your account for 20 days before making a new topic (those numbers just pulled out randomly).
How much is “many,” and how long is “too long”? I’m sure you see only a small percentage of the spam threads that are posted (or are attempted). During the day, few spam threads last more than a few minutes before we get to them, at least in GQ. A few may last longer at night when no mods are on line. We nail a significant number of spammers before they even post.
As tomndebb says, during Spamageddon a few weeks ago one or a few spammers kept posting constantly through the day even though their threads were deleted within a few minutes (and several of the names that they registered were banned before posting).
Things have slacked off quite a bit recently. Maybe some of them have been deterred, but maybe it’s something else.
While any amount of time for a spammer to survive is too long, most folks don’t have any idea just how good the anti-spamming is here. There’s another board I occasionally post at, for instance, where one sometimes sees spam that’s literally over a day old.
Legitimate posters get blocked by such actions. Some people see one thread through google or a column and find the board. They already have to register to post, putting limits on new threads would kill any incentive. Many people want to ask their own question first, then hang around to see what else is being discussed.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I have seen spam threads that have lasted for matters of hours. I know boards with more traffic, and therefore more attractive to spammers, where you’d be very (un)lucky to even see a spam thread because they are deleted so quickly. Those that operate the boards tell me this because for all the time the spam exists it is free advertising for spammers, so the longer spam exists, the more attractive a board is for spammers. Also on these boards any kind of response (even “reported”) is discouraged as this simply tells spammers that their posts are being read.
All the mods(except one, I think) are in US time zones. So evening/night is uncovered.
I really doubt many spammers watch the threads they infect, they’re on the clock to hit as many victims as possible.
Some of us keep weird hours or suffer from insomnia, so the night coverage isn’t as bad as you might think.
We don’t have schedules here on the SDMB. Some days we spend more time online and some days we spend less. Sometimes real life calls us away from the computer for a bit. Once in a while our varying schedules will line up in such a way that coverage might be a little light. So yeah, every now and then a spam might sit for a few hours before one of us gets online to take care of it.
We get most of them fairly quickly though, I think.
Spam threads may not be deleted for a while if they are posted overnight (when few people will see them anyway), or if they are posted to a forum where the mods might be offline for some reason. Even so, I don’t think that more than a small percentage of spam threads last more than a few minutes.
Are these free boards with volunteer moderators? How many moderators do they have? Can you post immediately upon registering, or do you have be approved first? Are there restrictions limiting how soon you can post or post new threads?
In my experience, the majority of spammers are hit-and-run types who don’t seem to monitor what happens to their posts. They just post as many as they can regardless of the fact that they are deleted almost immediately.
One of our current spammers has registered under at least 67 different names (and maybe a lot more), most of which have been banned and the posts deleted within a few minutes. Some of these guys are just very persistent regardless of what happens to the spam.