Spam postings

[Nca78]

So, we're back at it again :(
If necessary I volunteer to be moderator and do some weekend morning cleanup at Vietnamese time which is relatively close to invasion time of those chinese spamming robots...

[zboblamont]

@Nca78 Read your notification before opening on the laptop, 3 real posts out of 99+...
If the problem lies in creation of new accounts, can a secondary intercept not be introduced to validate which a robot cannot circumvent?

[mfalkvidd]

The account are being created by real people, so any captcha-type countermeasurement will unfortunately fail.

Why do we know this? The people behind the accounts get very angry and send us (admins) messages through different channels.

@Nca78 thanks for your offer. Having a human covering another time zone could be very useful. I'll check with the team and get back to you.

[zboblamont]

@mfalkvidd Wow, thanks for that explanation, all quite bizarre then, presumably disruption is their motivation...
Ok on the messages, presumably not wishing Merry Christmas....
What a mad world...

[hek]

Yes, pretty annoying people. I doubt they will sell more of whatever they're selling.

[Nca78]

@hek said in Spam postings:

Yes, pretty annoying people. I doubt they will sell more of whatever they're selling.

Maybe they're just looking for top position in searches when Chinese people look for specific things on saturday/sunday morning, they probably just need to be here a few hours to appear in search engines.

[hek]

I don't know about chineese search engines. But all external links is no-follow. So they shouldn't give them any better ranking.

[mfalkvidd]

There are no links in the posts. They sell forged university diplomas through WeChat. So all they need is for people to read the WeChat number. Nofollow doesn't matter.

[dbemowsk]

In the time that I have been a part of the community, this is the worst I have seen this. Special thanks to the moderators for fixing this.

[zboblamont]

@dbemowsk Absolutely...

[mfalkvidd]

@dbemowsk that's because we've been better at keeping them at bay. I think I've seen over thousand spam posts.

[zboblamont]

@mfalkvidd Perhaps concrete ankle bracelets would be better at keeping them at bay, or under it....

[hek]

Looks like we finally have the tools to keep spam out of the forum after upgrade.

This means a little more wait time for new users to get their posts accepted. But I think it's worth it to keep the evil spammers out.