THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Comic Discussion => QUESTIONABLE CONTENT => Topic started by: jwhouk on 21 Jan 2011, 06:58
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Didn't know where to put this, so figured putting it here would get notice of our mods:
Is there a way we can report obvious spammers without opening their threads, and by so doing accidentally giving them hits (like with the pharmacy thread)?
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Didn't know where to put this, so figured putting it here would get notice of our mods:
Is there a way we can report obvious spammers without opening their threads, and by so doing accidentally giving them hits (like with the pharmacy thread)?
No, all you can do is click that nifty little "Report this post to a moderator" link on the bottom right of each post.
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I suppose we could wait till the Moderators see for themselves, but where's the satisfaction in that?
I wouldn't click on any of their links, however. No way, no how, no sir!
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We do, of course, notice when we next check in (and I check several times a day, unless I am away from home). Most moderators don't bother with this part of the forum, but reporting a post gets a mail sent to all mods, so may get it dealt with faster (it's a mail, not a PM, so we can get to see it without having to connect to the forum site).
The procedure is then that the thread gets moved to a hidden Trashbin forum, so that an admin (i.e. Ben/"est") can pick it up and do the necessary banning of the poster, and their IP address. Ben is also actively developing the spam defences, so he may analyse the post as well before finally deleting it. If the spam post was added to another thread, we can split it off as a separate thread, and then move that to trash.
In the two months I've been doing this, the number of spams I've dealt with each day (over the whole forum) has dropped from an average of about six to less than one, so I reckon Ben is doing reasonably well at improving the defences at present.
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The procedure is then that the thread gets moved to a hidden Trashbin forum, so that an admin (i.e. Ben/"est") can pick it up and do the necessary banning of the poster, and their IP address.
I've found it much easier to just delete the spambot accounts, taking the posts with them.
Individually banning spambot accounts just clutters the ban list up (they never log back into old accounts), and banning their IP addresses is ineffective unless you ban the whole of China.
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I think Ben bans whole ranges, not just individual IPs; and he has noted that a substantial majority are not merely in China, but in a single province. Anyway, we leave that to him.
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At the moment we have maybe 30 IP ranges for China banned, and honestly I think that if I could get a definitive IP range list for China & Russia I'd probably just get rid of both entirely, because 99% of our spam and 0% of our actual membership base come from those areas.
Instead I have installed an add-on that checks in with a forum spam reporting service and marks certain people as possible spammers when they sign up. These members are then required to get manual signoff before they can activate their accounts. There is another add-on along those lines that I am looking into, but it requires some planning before installing.
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Paul has pointed out a great site for looking up IP ranges, but the legwork for entering in everything manually restricts me from making full use of it for now. I'll be looking into ways of entering IP ranges in an automated fashion, then perhaps we can take care of it.
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#1, I thought we had at least one active Chinese member?
#2, if your web browser supports easily turning images off (for example, Opera has that,) it at least prevents the image from loading from the spammer's server, although it still increments the thread view count.
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If you mean Akima, she lives in Australia.
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Is there a way we can report obvious spammers without opening their threads, and by so doing accidentally giving them hits?
I was under the impression that they gain nothing if you view the thread... only when you click through on their link and visit the site.
Is that incorrect?
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Is there a way we can report obvious spammers without opening their threads, and by so doing accidentally giving them hits?
I was under the impression that they gain nothing if you view the thread... only when you click through on their link and visit the site.
Is that incorrect?
No, you're right.
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They gain nothing, but they get a log entry showing were their post was successfully displayed. However, I can't believe that they use the few entries they get from here as positive encouragement to return. It's one of those things that it's not worth our effort bothering about, either - we just get on with blocking and deleting in any case.
Just FYI, although I only get to remove spam here, and Ben (est) does the work on the server blocking, in my day job I do a lot of spam blocking myself.
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Spammers should be dragged into Public Square and given 20 lashes.
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No. That's too GOOD for them.
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Ebola. Give them ebola.
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Ebola. Give them ebola.
No, because then they'd run around trying to spread it. If you're going to do that, you really need to quarantine them first.
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Nuke 'em from orbit.
it's the only way to be sure!
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Now yer talking Hicks. :-D