How to prevent spamming on mse

Mrembo · 14 June 2008 at 1:34AM

A lot of spam is being posted on the freebie section is there anyway of preventing spammers on this website?
One of my suggestion was once someone reports spam the message is removed immediately before it is checked out by the moderators.I don't know if this is possible.
Please if the above message is not suitable here please shift it to the right place

weegie.geek · 14 June 2008 at 6:29AM

Mrembo wrote: »

A lot of spam is being posted on the freebie section is there anyway of preventing spammers on this website?
One of my suggestion was once someone reports spam the message is removed immediately before it is checked out by the moderators.I don't know if this is possible.
Please if the above message is not suitable here please shift it to the right place

That's a ludicrous idea. The amount of trolls on here? All the sensible posts would be gone...

The spam is posted automatically by bots who scour the web for forums, sign up and post spam.

There's not really much you can do to stop it, bar making people complete a captcha (please enter the six letters or digits that appear on the image opposite) on registering, and then for their first x amount of posts.

The captcha is there to ensure it's a real person signing up, and not a bot. The reason the text is all wavy or the letters are stretched etc is because it makes it much harder for a bot to OCR the letters. Problem with that is, all the spamming companies do is get someone in a third-world country to read the captcha and respond with the correct letters/numbers. The wages are so low that it makes financial sense to pay someone to do it.

The site already has a captcha on registering, but if it was extended to the first x posts, I'm sure it'd cut down on the spam a fair bit.

A captcha for the first post would double the costs for the spammers straight away.

Since the bot tends to sign up once, spam maybe half a dozen forums and leave, if we were all required to enter captchas for our first 10 posts, that'd cover the spammers, and would cost them 11x as much on each wave of spam.

Whether it'd stop enough spam to be worth annoying newbies to the forum or not though...

Spam's annoying, but not half as annoying as the dozen people who add replies to spam, bumping it to the top of the forum each time.

Having said that, perhaps it's better to keep the spam in view so the local board guides can see it and close/delete it, rather than report it and wait for the abuse team who appear to do nothing... Or maybe the more visible it is the more people will report it to the abuse team.

I've reported loads of posts in the past, and nothing was done about them, so I stopped bothering. I'm sure there are many others in the same boat as me.

What WOULD help is if the powers that be made the report a post button work entirely via the website, not just an email link to report the post. It's stupid doing it the way it's done just now. A lot of people don't even have email clients setup, preferring to use web-based email like hotmail etc. Sure, you can get plugins or toolbars that make mailto: links work with hotmail and gmail, but someone has to (a) find spam, (b) click to report it, (c) enter their hotmail/gmail/whatever password and username and login, then (d) send the email. 4 steps (and several webpages loaded - not good for people browsing while mobile) for what should only be one or two clicks.

If a post rating system was implemented, maybe on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 star being deemed inappropriate (for spam or other stuff that's not allowed on the forum), then I think that'd help a lot of the problems. Receive 10 (or however many) one star ratings and the post's automatically flagged for a moderator to evaluate, and perhaps stopped from being able to be bumped to the top of the posts? Done entirely through the website, not via mailto: links or anything silly like that.

Click a star, enter an optional comment, and hit ok.

Sure, there's room for abuse, but it's not anonymous like the current report a post function, so repeated offenders could be warned or banned from the forum.

CHR15 · 14 June 2008 at 8:59AM

^^ Good description.

They could also insist on ISP based email addresses be confirmed before posting. A lot of forums already implement this but, as has been sad, a lot of people only use the free emails (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail etc)