When is MSE going to do something about this endless daily repeated multiple SPAM

System

Saver0811 wrote: »

Hence my original proposition of auto blocking daily repeated multiple SPAM.....

where you don't need any human intervention until start of MSE workday.

Yeah your ideas were quite sensible. Not sure about the new poster one but the others were all good

Nilrem

johnnyboyrebel wrote: »

A voice of reason, noone seems to realise that on a forum where people know what they are doing, there won't be spam ever!

Maybe thats the difference between voluntary guides and people who o it for a living? I dont think it is relevant though, if people want to be board guides they should do the job, voluntary or not. If they don;t need to do the job properly because they dont get paid for it then why have them at all?

I've been a mod on a fairly large forum, you have only one choice if you don't want spam to get through, ever.
Moderate every post (not just the first few, but every post anyone makes, or at least the first few hundred).

Everything else you do is just trying to cut down on what gets through, and it's a hard job to reduce the spam that gets through, without making it impossible for the normal (and often not very tech savvy) users to use the site.
IP blocks are ineffective and likely to block legitimate users, email black lists again are more or less useless (or at best a major issue for some real people), and captcha's and question/answers either don't stop all the bots/spam accounts, or make it too hard for real users to register/use the forum.

To get 24/7 cover you realistically need at least 4 shifts working 8 hours a day (4 shifts to allow for time off;)), with at least 2 people per shift, especially on a large forum like this.

That's not really feasible unless Mr Lewis is making a not so small fortune from the forum, what I suspect he does have though is a team of volunteers who try to make sure that someone is checking up on a regular basis and getting emails informing them of spam reports.

About the only thing that they could do, and I'm not sure how feasible it is with this forum software/the hardware behind it, is to implement some sort of post comparison thing for new posts, where the server compares posts by a user and if they make say 2 posts the same in X minutes it blocks the posts.
However even that doesn't stop the sort of bots that are smart enough to change the content of the post slightly.

To be honest, I'm actually surprised at how little spam I see on here, I see the odd one but it's fairly rare which tends to indicate to me that the team dealing with it are doing a pretty good job (and probably have a fair number of volunteers, almost certainly with at least one paid/on call tech or the hosting service includes one as part of the package to deal with server issues).

scheming_gypsy

Saver0811 wrote: »

Hence my original proposition of auto blocking daily repeated multiple SPAM.....

where you don't need any human intervention until start of MSE workday.

but you need bulletin board software than can do what you're suggesting.

stephen77

I guess a mod reading this.

Can I ask when you became a mod?

When you became a mod on here. What was expected of you on this fourm?

At the moment we are trying to second guess your responability.

MancLass

Darksun wrote: »

Yeah! Why is this free website not employing people 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to ensure spam posts are instantly removed!

Most other free forums do and most others proactively moderate without any legal issues

System

MancLass wrote: »

Most other free forums do and most others proactively moderate without any legal issues

Can we have some examples of a free forum with over 1 million posters who operate a 24 hour 7 day a week mod cover? I would be suprised if "most" other free forums offer this service....

MancLass

goater78 wrote: »

Can we have some examples of a free forum with over 1 million posters who operate a 24 hour 7 day a week mod cover? I would be suprised if "most" other free forums offer this service....

before the owner went crazy, LivingWithStyle, 100% free and gave posters MONEY to post.

Look at even bigger forums, They don't have this problem, Examples at http://www.big-boards.com/

pelirocco

On a scale of 1 to 10 of whats really important in your life / the world ........where does figure OP?

MancLass

pelirocco wrote: »

On a scale of 1 to 10 of whats really important in your life / the world ........where does figure OP?

In threads like this on LivingWithStyle they would have a forum poll to answer such questions

"Do you really care?"
Yes
No
Adult Swim (Comedy option)

Norman_Castle

Please don't quote any post that you believe is spam, as this causes the team more work

Quoted from the form rules. Saver0811 would help the moderators by deleting the spam quoted by them.