Spambots - an apology

MSE_Martin

Hi folks,

I just wanted to come on here and apologise. I've been made aware we are currently being plagued by spambots. That isn't good enough. I know its being going on too long.

I was on leave for a fortnight and came back last week, and if I'm honest it didn't hit my radar properly in the 'rushing to get everything done once back', now it has.

I've now seen the extent of this and while my forum team have been doing their best to fire fight it - that's been piecemeal and we need to aim for a much bigger solution to block it once and for all.

This afternoon I'm pulling together MSE's senior management and techie team to try and come up with a more robust solution so we can kick this to touch.

I can't promise we'll get it done by tomorrow - but I can promise we're now putting grown up resources in place to try and sort it. I'm going to ask the forum team to give you updates via this thread.

Again, sorry for the inconvenience, we haven't dealt with this to the level you should expect from us.

Martin

PS please meanwhile do click the spam button on these threads

fermi

Thank you Martin.

It is something that has escalated out of control beyond anyone's expectation in the last week or 2, and therefore, I think, so have people's frustrations.

Upsidedown_Bear

Thank you

Nile

Thank you Martin.

You and your team will see that we've been doing our bit to help.

Members are clicking the spam button and board guides are removing threads on their boards, which has helped but it has been hard work to deal with a plague of spam recently.;)

redux

There are still posts lying around from 8 or 9 am.

Either they've been reported and not acted on yet, or people have become apathetic about reporting them, I don't know which.

Use a better captcha mechanism will prevent the automatic ones signing up, and it shouldn't be difficult to do some IP address searches and discover that blocking a couple of small ranges will fix quite a bit more, and after all not many of this forum's genuine members are going to want to post from China Korea or Pakistan.

Former_MSE_Andrea

redux wrote: »

There are still posts lying around from 8 or 9 am.

Either they've been reported and not acted on yet, or people have become apathetic about reporting them, I don't know which.

Use a better captcha mechanism will prevent the automatic ones signing up, and it shouldn't be difficult to do some IP address searches and discover that blocking a couple of small ranges will fix quite a bit more, and after all not many of this forum's genuine members are going to want to post from China Korea or Pakistan.

Could you help report or spam button them please?

Thank you!

jamesd

Regular expressions are an approach that has been working for eleven years for the 7th ranked global web site.

That global list is combined with site-specific sub-lists, IP range blocks and a range of robots to keep things under reasonable control in a place where millions of pages are mostly editable by anyone.

You're handicapped by the working hours of your team, particularly those with the capability to use high-power fixes.

By now you should have a good database of those who combine high spam reporting rates with low false positive rates. Presumably there are ways available to leverage that information, or can be.

Don't let this discourage you from taking a break, work-life balance applies even for founders.

fermi

redux wrote: »

There are still posts lying around from 8 or 9 am.

Still there? I've just tidied a few.

I will say that as the forum search tends to lag very slightly, when you are rushing to get rid of posts the very latest ones which may not be showing up on the search of a username yet can easily get overlooked.

torbrex

I first reported the problem with the spambots back in March and a thread has been regularly updated with possible solutions to the problem but sadly nothing was put into place and I have no doubt there still would be no change if Martin had not been contacted directly through Twitter.

torbrex

fermi wrote: »

Still there? I've just tidied a few.

I will say that as the forum search tends to lag very slightly, when you are rushing to get rid of posts the very latest ones which may not be showing up on the search of a username yet can easily get overlooked.

still 9 on DT from before 8am

joansgirl

And for some of us, clicking the spam button causes our browsers to crash