Anti Spam Petition

moneyistooshorttomention

This is a petition to MSE to request them to please alter their settings to block foreign language characters - eg Korean.

It is possible to ban individual words written in English and we have all seen perfectly innocent words not passing the "filters".

Therefore we believe it must be possible to have foreign language characters filtered out and thus much of this current outbreak of foreign language spam would be stopped at source.

Please "thank" this post and/or add your own comments if you agree.

kathrynha

I agree. This is a British forum, and therefore all posts should be in English.


Obviously some characters other than the 26 letters of the alphabet are needed for punctuation and emoticons, but it should be easy to set a limit

SailorSam

Some of these spammers this morning of made 80 or more posts within the hour, one has almost 200.
Could we just stop anyone else joining Mse until a solution is found.

sillygoose

The pages today with lots of spam of those characters like the Credit forum actually caused Chrome browser to crash every time and I had to kill it!

grumbler

moneyistooshorttomention wrote: »

...Therefore we believe it must be possible to have foreign language characters filtered out and thus much of this current outbreak of foreign language spam would be stopped at source...

Filtering is a temporary solution.
I believe that radical measures are needed, not temporary.

scarlet55

sillygoose wrote: »

The pages today with lots of spam of those characters like the Credit forum actually caused Chrome browser to crash every time and I had to kill it!

Happened to me too, on this board! clicked on the thread to press spam and chrome crashed!

NeverInDebt

MSE doesn't appear to care about doing anything meaningful to remove spam on this board. I no longer use MSE forums much now. MSE is more interested in making money for moneysupermarket. This forum has gone down hill since its owner sold out

As MSE doesn't appear to want to do much it will definitely get worse on here as its a target for spam bots as they see mse forums as a soft touch

Silk

Posting rights for Newbies should be removed until their first post has been approved by a mod.
It's hardly rocket science.

Mandelbrot

moneyistooshorttomention wrote: »

This is a petition to MSE to request them to please alter their settings to block foreign language characters - eg Korean.

It is possible to ban individual words written in English and we have all seen perfectly innocent words not passing the "filters".

Therefore we believe it must be possible to have foreign language characters filtered out and thus much of this current outbreak of foreign language spam would be stopped at source.

The 'word filter' is not designed to be a 'spam filter' and would not do the job required.
What is needed is for someone at MSE Towers to actually address the issue properly. There were people there in the past who would have probably done so. They are no longer there.

sillygoose

Silk wrote: »

Posting rights for Newbies should be removed until their first post has been approved by a mod.
It's hardly rocket science.

Yes great idea!

They could also spot those posts when someone tags on the end of an old thread some post of generic advice trying to sound legitimate, but you just know they are post building until they can put links and a spam attack.

I have seen many good forums die from out of control spam. I don't know how many peoples clicks it takes on the spam button to kill a post but perhaps it should be temporarily reduced to 5.

Former_MSE_Andrea

Hi everyone

I've just posted on another thread, could you take a look at that one please?

Thanks!