Epidemic of immortal spammers

G

GnI

Member
Hello, I think this is the correct place to post this, since description states that this part of forum relates to AF forums as well, so...

I just wanted to ask: isn't there a better way to deal with accounts created for spamming? Some sort of automated system which wouldn't allow to post spam-suspected posts without administration's approval, for example. I just want to believe that in this, information age, there is a system, or at least a prototype to analyzing texts and detecting which of those might be spam. And there is! There are spam-filters for e-mail. So, won't modified version of it would work for forums also?

It's just a question that occurred for me, after seeing some sort of spam message every 1-2 days. And they always come in bulk. If one account gets banned, then some other account would emerge with the same spam message.

The question system currently in use, helps to some extent. Yes, spambot is less likely to create account of its own. But, what if it gets created manually, and the creator of that account, puts the URL of forum + Username + Password in spambot's database, then without automatic textual analysis of posts, it is hard to stop them posting. Because their posts tend to litter up the forums, and, since the spambots can spam for pornographic web-sites as well, and this forum might, potentially, have under-age people in it, it should be reason enough to not allow them to post spam.

 
dual captchas?
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Well, it really hardly help in this case:

The question system currently in use, helps to some extent. Yes, spambot is less likely to create account of its own. But, what if it gets created manually, and the creator of that account, puts the URL of forum + Username + Password in spambot's database, then without automatic textual analysis of posts, it is hard to stop them posting.
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Also, captchas can be breached by a lot of AIs now...

Better is have a 1-3 day waiting period before new accounts can post anything visible, giving them a warning about it, and letting everything they post sit in a dedicated folder for the admins/mods to look through to see if they're spambots. If they are spambots, you can ban them before they post anything on the forums, keeping it much cleaner. (most spambots start posting withing moments of the account being created)

 
Also, captchas can be breached by a lot of AIs now...
Better is have a 1-3 day waiting period before new accounts can post anything visible, giving them a warning about it, and letting everything they post sit in a dedicated folder for the admins/mods to look through to see if they're spambots. If they are spambots, you can ban them before they post anything on the forums, keeping it much cleaner. (most spambots start posting withing moments of the account being created)
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That is one of a viable solutions. But there are some spambots who have a delay of about a month from account creation until first post. Given the most recent activities, I saw some spambot with account created at 18th of November with a first message at the beginning of December. And after that one was banned, I saw other one with exactly the same message later that evening, which was created at 19th of November. So, possibly it would restrict actions of some spambots, but not all of them. But, hey! At least some prevention is better than nothing!

 
The first x number of posts any new user makes has to be approved by an administrator?
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That would work!

Because spambots don't post anything else than their spam messages (I haven't seen one that makes at least one post that wouldn't be useless and off-topic).

 
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