Spambots

fermi

Nearly 1,000 spam threads on the money boards today, and counting.....

fermi

Maybe this explains something? :rotfl:

photome

MSE_Andrea wrote: »

Hi everyone!

I've posted on this thread

To answer the question of moderating first posts we can't do that for a few reasons

a) For legal reasons we don't moderate
b) Over 300 people join the forum every day
c) We encourage newbies to join and join in saving money straight away eg in Forum giveaways, debt-free challenges etc.


Thanks for the suggestions though, we are reading and noting them!

That reads like..we dont want to, or cant be bothered to do anything

blindman

Goldiegirl wrote: »

It was bad enough when the spam was limited to 'out of hours', but now it's all day.

I've spent the last half hour reporting spam, and still it's pouring in.

It's ludicrous now.

I think MSE needs to stop new registrations forthwith, until they work out how they can stop this tide of rubbish

So what if the stoppage of new registrations infringes the spammers human rights and a couple of newbies can't start 'saving money straightaway'.

Surely drastic action is now required?

At the very least suspend registrations during the Out of hours (00:01 and 08:00) so users are not faced in the morning with every page full of spam as no-one is around to delete it.

sidefx

fermi wrote: »

Nearly 1,000 spam threads on the money boards today, and counting.....

:eek: Hat's off to you if you've counted them all!:D

fermi wrote: »

Maybe this explains something? :rotfl:

Working hard indeed!!:p

prowla

moneyistooshorttomention wrote: »

I do think we owe a "Thank you" to the Board Guides for being as patient as they have been about deleting this spam onslaught.:T

It must be feeling like dealing with a hydra - chop off one head and another one appears.

The forum itself needs to put measures in place to stop them, and not leave it to people to clean them up.

sillygoose

What I don't understand is it must take someone some effort to post these spam messages, even with some software automating it. why?

After all these years of spam out there and the obvious dubious nature of the posts everyone knows and ignores it, surely the amount of return must be so infinitely minuscule that its not worth even the smallest of efforts to do it?

I can only imagine there must be a worthwhile tiny minority of people out there still naive or daft enough to respond to the spam. Scary.

I wonder what year the world will reach a critical mass of enough of the population being sufficiently tech-savvy and make the return rate on spam so low it costs more to send than it makes. And so dies a natural death?

Angry_Bear

I've been thinking about this some more*, and why not have a system where all the posts from a user name are automatically deleted (until they can be reviewed by a real person) if they reach a limit of posts marked as spam within a time frame. For example, if 3 posts in a day are marked as spam by enough people to cause automatic delete.

I can't imagine a realistic scenario where that would happen to a newbie so it wouldn't frighten them off. While it woulnd't immediately solve the spam problem, it would mean that wiping out a few posts would clean up the boards.

This suggestion assumes there's someone at MSE towers capable of modding the forum software. Although if not, it might be worth paying someone to do it, or something like?

elona

If as a regular poster for ten years I cannot use an e acute - then why can pages of foreign words be allowed to spammers?

There are plenty of other forums where only a few posts are allowed while a new member so why can spambots work with impunity?

Maktina

What I don't understand is it must take someone some effort to post these spam messages, even with some software automating it. why?

It's a bit like carpet bombing. You might have a single target and can't target it directly - so you bomb everything to try and get at it. These bots rely on forums to be slow in responding to their spam. In some cases where old forums which have been left to rot spam threads remain and get picked up by search bots - those results then go into result pages on sites like Google which allow people seeking 'online betting', for example, to find these types of sites.