Silk Road forums
Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: Robin on January 17, 2013, 04:31 pm
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So it seems there is a debate going around on the prevention of spam and the methods to use to do so, and some of the methods recently used certainly didn't help at all and just pissed off a lot of people and vendors. I know this whole thing was implemented to take a load of off moderators, and prevent newbie question threads popping up all over the place all of the time, and at some extent to try and reduce spam. But it didn't work.
I think the only way to ease the moderators/administrators jobs as well as prevent spam is to get more moderators. At least 5 local moderators for each section of the forum, who'd be able to moderate the sections on different times when available. This solution seems to be the quickest and easiest to implement, and for now seems to be the most effective.
As for reducing the newbie question threads popping up all over the place all of the time, you could implement a thread dedicated to containing a list of links that contain threads with questions that have been already answered or a dedicated FAQ thread or forum section, where users would be able to ask and answer questions. Just for the questions and answers, i.e. there could be a sub-forum in the 'Question' section of the forum all about safety of shipping drugs, or something like that. You get the idea.
And to even further protect the members, whenever registering you could have a thread in which a user is forced to read, with a timer of 20 sec. like other forums have with forum rules and the scam websites, and certain websites that you shouldn't trust.
I think the Newbie Forum 50-post thing is a bit out of hand and will just piss a lot of people off, and it certainly did not prevent bots from posting 50-times over and over and gaining access to the main sub-forums.
Just a penny for your thoughts.
Robin.
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ATM the spam is gone.
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It is not possible for bots to post here since there are captchas in place. As for the newbie section its probably the best idea for preventing spam.
The last spammer we had was doing it manually since they had to input the captcha lol. Now they have to post in newbie section AND complete a captcha. This will make it easy for the spam to be cleared up and accounts deleted.
Job done. Well done SR staff!
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Yep, last night it was wayyyyy easier to control the spam because it was all relegated to that single subforum. This morning, I'm just going through and cleaning up the leftovers! :D
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So it seems there is a debate going around on the prevention of spam and the methods to use to do so, and some of the methods recently used certainly didn't help at all and just pissed off a lot of people and vendors. I know this whole thing was implemented to take a load of off moderators, and prevent newbie question threads popping up all over the place all of the time, and at some extent to try and reduce spam. But it didn't work.
I think the only way to ease the moderators/administrators jobs as well as prevent spam is to get more moderators. At least 5 local moderators for each section of the forum, who'd be able to moderate the sections on different times when available. This solution seems to be the quickest and easiest to implement, and for now seems to be the most effective.
As for reducing the newbie question threads popping up all over the place all of the time, you could implement a thread dedicated to containing a list of links that contain threads with questions that have been already answered or a dedicated FAQ thread or forum section, where users would be able to ask and answer questions. Just for the questions and answers, i.e. there could be a sub-forum in the 'Question' section of the forum all about safety of shipping drugs, or something like that. You get the idea.
And to even further protect the members, whenever registering you could have a thread in which a user is forced to read, with a timer of 20 sec. like other forums have with forum rules and the scam websites, and certain websites that you shouldn't trust.
I think the Newbie Forum 50-post thing is a bit out of hand and will just piss a lot of people off, and it certainly did not prevent bots from posting 50-times over and over and gaining access to the main sub-forums.
Just a penny for your thoughts.
Robin.
This is what stickies are. Your right about the newbie section not working if you didn't know that. This is why we came to the conclusion in the other thread it needs to be 2 factor automatic modulation. Post count AND time based. Each user should only be allowed 5-10 posts a day, and only graduate to full member at 50 posts. The "timer" is called a captcha, and again, it's already implemented and not helping. As for VIRWEX scammers, i think we need to find a way to do a word ban in thread titles. That would completely eliminate the scammers, until they make a new site which also can be instantly permabanned.
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So it seems there is a debate going around on the prevention of spam and the methods to use to do so, and some of the methods recently used certainly didn't help at all and just pissed off a lot of people and vendors. I know this whole thing was implemented to take a load of off moderators, and prevent newbie question threads popping up all over the place all of the time, and at some extent to try and reduce spam. But it didn't work.
I think the only way to ease the moderators/administrators jobs as well as prevent spam is to get more moderators. At least 5 local moderators for each section of the forum, who'd be able to moderate the sections on different times when available. This solution seems to be the quickest and easiest to implement, and for now seems to be the most effective.
As for reducing the newbie question threads popping up all over the place all of the time, you could implement a thread dedicated to containing a list of links that contain threads with questions that have been already answered or a dedicated FAQ thread or forum section, where users would be able to ask and answer questions. Just for the questions and answers, i.e. there could be a sub-forum in the 'Question' section of the forum all about safety of shipping drugs, or something like that. You get the idea.
And to even further protect the members, whenever registering you could have a thread in which a user is forced to read, with a timer of 20 sec. like other forums have with forum rules and the scam websites, and certain websites that you shouldn't trust.
I think the Newbie Forum 50-post thing is a bit out of hand and will just piss a lot of people off, and it certainly did not prevent bots from posting 50-times over and over and gaining access to the main sub-forums.
Just a penny for your thoughts.
Robin.
This is what stickies are. Your right about the newbie section not working if you didn't know that. This is why we came to the conclusion in the other thread it needs to be 2 factor automatic modulation. Post count AND time based. Each user should only be allowed 5-10 posts a day, and only graduate to full member at 50 posts. The "timer" is called a captcha, and again, it's already implemented and not helping. As for VIRWEX scammers, i think we need to find a way to do a word ban in thread titles. That would completely eliminate the scammers, until they make a new site which also can be instantly permabanned.
I meant a timer as in a timer on a rule/website warning thread in which a newly registered member would be redirected and be forced to read the rules and the websites to be aware of before being able continue, and after 20 seconds he'd be allowed to press the "I Understand" button or whatever and continue onto the main forum. A lot of forums implement this security technique.
As for the captcha, I think it could be effective if it was a bit better, rather than the default Simple Machine's CAPTCHA system. At the moment any spam bot built for Simple Machines forums can bypass it easily and spam the heck out of the boards whenever they wish whether it's the newbie board or the main boards when 50-posts are reached, with that being said a human could manually do it too since the captcha is extremely easy. I think captcha isn't the best solution to prevent spam, it just deteriorates.
Hopefully we'll see better security/anti-spam measures implemented in the near feature which won't cause an outrage within SR community.
Robin.
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I think there are better ways to handle the first 50 posts thing.
Don't allow anyone to start new threads until 50 posts. Only allow 5 posts per day. One per hour. Furthermore, just ban spamming in general and make it an offense punishable by account deletion. This way it will take spammers ten days of posting legitimate messages to get an account able to truly post SPAM. No way will they go through that effort.
The newbie forum has turned into nothing but SPAM so while the change has relegated the SPAM mainly to the one forum, it has actually increased the overall amount of SPAM and turned regular users who wouldn't normally SPAM into spammers. There is no way to tell real potential members from real spammers. And real spammers can still make 50 posts in under an hour in the newbie forum and go out to spam the rest of the forums.
Sure it is an improvement over no protections but it is certainly not optimal.
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ATM the spam is gone.
Yah for this exact minute.. It showed up several times on the board tonight even with these new measure outside of the newbie forum.
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Yah for this exact minute.. It showed up several times on the board tonight even with these new measure outside of the newbie forum.
I know -- I'm a bit under the weather and passed out for a bit there. Back though and removed the 100+ spam posts. Sorry for the delay in getting them.
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Scout I am sure you are doing your best.
I just think that some other technical measures could be implemented to make your job and the other moderator's jobs easier.
If we have a longer period of time to catch the spammers before they can start new threads it would be a lot easier for one of the moderators to have a chance to see it before they can.
50 posts + captcha = about an hour of time. Probably more like 40 minutes. Moderators are not on this often. 10 days (or even 2 days) of forced legitimate posts would seriously deter this and highlight the spammers much better.