More moderators to fight spam

I really think more mods would help fighting the huge amount of spam.
They would also be useful if we start setting a system to approve new user's posts, the post would be approved faster and the forum would work smother (e.g. discussions in "Ask a Pro").

o/ i'll sacrifice myself for the modspot.

As for the system to approve new users posts, that might scare new users from posting.
i'd suggest using the previously suggested feature ("NO LINKS IN FIRST POST") and then limit the amount of characters in firstpost.
and also : recaptcha on registering.

Alekso56, on 15 January 2013 - 04:14 AM said:

As for the system to approve new users posts, that might scare new users from posting.
i'd suggest using the previously suggested feature ("NO LINKS IN FIRST POST") and then limit the amount of characters in firstpost.
and also : recaptcha on registering.

Finally someone who read my suggestion! :D/>

I'm not sure if a recaptcha would be better than a normal one, as explained in other posts low paid workers in poor countries can solve 1000 captchas for a few dollars.

Leo Verto, on 15 January 2013 - 04:53 AM said:

Alekso56, on 15 January 2013 - 04:14 AM said:

As for the system to approve new users posts, that might scare new users from posting.
i'd suggest using the previously suggested feature ("NO LINKS IN FIRST POST") and then limit the amount of characters in firstpost.
and also : recaptcha on registering.

Finally someone who read my suggestion! :D/>

I'm not sure if a recaptcha would be better than a normal one, as explained in other posts low paid workers in poor countries can solve 1000 captchas for a few dollars.

We already use a reCaptcha.

Cranium, on 15 January 2013 - 05:46 AM said:

We already use a reCaptcha.

Adding a hidden captcha, one that users can't see but bots try to solve might help too.

But we have other threads to discuss automated solutions.

I personally think we have enough admins/moderators. I would rather prevent the spam before it happens if possible.

Cranium, on 15 January 2013 - 06:11 AM said:

I personally think we have enough admins/moderators. I would rather prevent the spam before it happens if possible.

The total amount of admins and moderators does not equal the amount of admins and mods who are active and actively removing spam.

The answer isn't simply more moderators. There are already enough of us in widely-enough spaced time zones that there is almost always someone online moderating. The answer is better prevention, and the moderation and administration teams continue to explore all possibilities.

On a side note, I'll be using the full version of the forum on my phone now, so I'll be moderating on breaks at work, so there should be even fuller time coverage.

That's good to hear, but earlier today we had 10 spam posts in general until I bugged Cruor about it and shortly afterwards 5 spam posts again.

Leo Verto, on 15 January 2013 - 10:24 AM said:

That's good to hear, but earlier today we had 10 spam posts in general until I bugged Cruor about it and shortly afterwards 5 spam posts again.

Are 10 spam posts going to hurt the forum at all if they're only up there for a few minutes? I don't think so. Just report the posts and they'll disappear shortly after, no harm done. Having more moderators in order to act more 'quickly' to the situation is not a solution to the problem - it's just a slap-on hot fix. If you want to help solve the spam problem, then really the only way to do so is by making it more difficult for the spammers. If the current administrators feel that they're getting overloaded with the spam, then they'll put feelers out there for more help.

Personally, I've hardly noticed much spam, and I'm on these forums a fair bit. Sure, the occasional one makes it through, but that's pretty much inevitable when it comes to open forums like this.

Lyqyd, on 15 January 2013 - 08:05 AM said:

There are already enough of us in widely-enough spaced time zones that there is almost always someone online moderating.

Really? Because I've been on almost 24/7 for about a week now and unless you guys are in anonymous mode, there is about a 2-4 hour time frame where no one is ever on…

Leo Verto, on 15 January 2013 - 10:24 AM said:

That's good to hear, but earlier today we had 10 spam posts in general until I bugged Cruor about it and shortly afterwards 5 spam posts again.

I like how you say we only have 10 then 5…….. we get WAY more than that… but just click the report and they will be dealt with…

TheOriginalBIT, on 15 January 2013 - 02:41 PM said:

I like how you say we only have 10 then 5…….. we get WAY more than that… but just click the report and they will be dealt with…

I don't mean to start a post war here or anything. That is just how it seems to me. Although I am not on here 24/7 like you say you are, I am on these forums every day for at least a few hours. I personally have only noticed the occasional spam post every few days, so they must be posted at times when I'm either asleep or in school. The admins have done a very good job taking care of it so far, so kudos to you guys. Of course I can understand why you're sick of the spam - it's damn annoying to see that crap clogging up the forum. But every community I've ever been a part of has had this problem, and more admins wasn't a solution.

Edit: As for what solutions they did have, they range from simply just ignoring the posts and deleting them to drastic changes such as "nooby waiting periods" where new users weren't allowed to post for certain periods of time. With a smaller (Although growing!) community such as this one, we don't really want to stymie any possible growth with waiting periods, and captchas are pretty easy to crack. So what does that leave us? Well perhaps we could use a word-list of things having to do with advertisements which would require an admin to approve the post before it went 'live'. Of course, that could be at times too sensitive and at other times not enough (I've noticed that the spam seems to use a lot of random words and such rather than explicit advertisement language). But as far as I can tell, it's one of the better options out there. Really though, no solution is perfect. There are always going to be spammers out there annoying us with their ads and links to shoe sales in New Jersey that nobody cares about.

My apologies if this seems like a rant. Just trying to help out here.

TheOriginalBIT, on 15 January 2013 - 02:41 PM said:

Really? Because I've been on almost 24/7 for about a week now and unless you guys are in anonymous mode, there is about a 2-4 hour time frame where no one is ever on…

Addict much?

Bubba, on 15 January 2013 - 02:46 PM said:

- snip -

I'm not saying that the admins aren't doing a good job, just saying it gets spammed more than you think… actually I think we have had about 5 since you posting this, and me typing this…
TL;DR the edit

Dlcruz129, on 15 January 2013 - 03:00 PM said:

Addict much?

Nah just really bored :P/> When I'm sick of coding i come over, refresh, read, respond, then back to coding :P/>

Dlcruz129, on 15 January 2013 - 03:00 PM said:

Addict much?

I'm worse, because I started after him, and have waaay more posts.

On topic, I do want to reiterate that the best way of preventing spam is to prevent the accounts from being created in the first place.

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" –Benjamin Franklin.

Cranium, on 15 January 2013 - 04:42 PM said:

On topic, I do want to reiterate that the best way of preventing spam is to prevent the accounts from being created in the first place.

Indeed, but we don't want to limit legitimate growth do we? I believe that beyond a captcha and email verification there is not much that you can do in terms of preventing account creation by bots, and apparently they have figured out a way to automate that process (or as somebody else said hire cheap laborers to do it).

Nice quote btw :)/>/>

Cranium, on 15 January 2013 - 04:42 PM said:

Dlcruz129, on 15 January 2013 - 03:00 PM said:

Addict much?

I'm worse, because I started after him, and have waaay more posts.

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" –Benjamin Franklin.

Since like Dec 1 I've got those, 998 at time of posting, posts… not since when I was first member…

And nice quote… :)/>

Bubba, on 15 January 2013 - 05:51 PM said:

Indeed, but we don't want to limit legitimate growth do we? I believe that beyond a captcha and email verification there is not much that you can do in terms of preventing account creation by bots, and apparently they have figured out a way to automate that process (or as somebody else said hire cheap laborers to do it).

Nice quote btw :)/>/>

Well, I did post a suggestion already on the sticky for this area. It involves changing the way that we have for spam prevention, and it is already enabled on IP.Board. We would just need to add it to the forums.

Bubba, on 15 January 2013 - 02:46 PM said:

Edit: As for what solutions they did have, they range from simply just ignoring the posts and deleting them to drastic changes such as "nooby waiting periods" where new users weren't allowed to post for certain periods of time. With a smaller (Although growing!) community such as this one, we don't really want to stymie any possible growth with waiting periods, and captchas are pretty easy to crack. So what does that leave us? Well perhaps we could use a word-list of things having to do with advertisements which would require an admin to approve the post before it went 'live'. Of course, that could be at times too sensitive and at other times not enough (I've noticed that the spam seems to use a lot of random words and such rather than explicit advertisement language). But as far as I can tell, it's one of the better options out there. Really though, no solution is perfect. There are always going to be spammers out there annoying us with their ads and links to shoe sales in New Jersey that nobody cares about.

Well, they all depend on links and my idea is to deny posts including links (maybe except for pastebin) for new users, but ALL said he prefers to deal with spam manually or setup a post approving system for new users.

But Cranium's quote is true and preventing spam is much better than deleting it manually.

Edit: I suddenly realize how low my example numbers were, 22 spam posts right now and no mod online (except for Cloudy, but he's always online).

Edit 2: But as usual calling Cruor on IRC helps.

Well sorry for doing something called "school", and its just to drop me a ping anyways.
I think we have enough moderators to cover pretty much 24/7, and i also assume none of them have problems with a little reminder ping on the IRC to fix forum stuff.

Cruor, on 16 January 2013 - 02:04 AM said:

Well sorry for doing something called "school", and its just to drop me a ping anyways.
I think we have enough moderators to cover pretty much 24/7, and i also assume none of them have problems with a little reminder ping on the IRC to fix forum stuff.

Going to school is not a bad thing, most of us have to do it or to go to work and I appreciate your fast reactions after telling you about spam on IRC. But sometimes the spam just takes over and it seems to be getting more and move these days.

I haven't been following this forum for a while but this happened on another forum that I was part of. There were constantly new bots that would post random advertisements. The way we solved it was by putting in this type of CAPTCHA. It shows you a picture and it has parts of the picture that you must rearrange to create the picture that it showed to you at first. This was asked to solve by the user when they tried to register. Hopefully that can help you guys :)/>

EDIT: It's called Key CAPTCHA or something similar.

Shazz, on 16 January 2013 - 04:43 PM said:

I haven't been following this forum for a while but this happened on another forum that I was part of. There were constantly new bots that would post random advertisements. The way we solved it was by putting in this type of CAPTCHA. It shows you a picture and it has parts of the picture that you must rearrange to create the picture that it showed to you at first. This was asked to solve by the user when they tried to register. Hopefully that can help you guys :)/>

EDIT: It's called Key CAPTCHA or something similar.

They added CAPTCHA a couple of months back. It only helped a little bit.

Luanub, on 16 January 2013 - 05:06 PM said:

Shazz, on 16 January 2013 - 04:43 PM said:

I haven't been following this forum for a while but this happened on another forum that I was part of. There were constantly new bots that would post random advertisements. The way we solved it was by putting in this type of CAPTCHA. It shows you a picture and it has parts of the picture that you must rearrange to create the picture that it showed to you at first. This was asked to solve by the user when they tried to register. Hopefully that can help you guys :)/>

EDIT: It's called Key CAPTCHA or something similar.

They added CAPTCHA a couple of months back. It only helped a little bit.

It's an IPBoard plugin that supplies random games the user has to solve instead of a catpcha.

I suggested this not too long ago here: http://www.computercraft.info/forums2/index.php?/topic/6137-input-needed-spam/
It should work fine, and shouldn't need much modification to the website.

I agree that the spam is increasing dramatically recently, it is getting to the point where you may find a full screen of spam in the general section… the admins are doing a great job though. from what I have heard the report section is getting totally bogged up. is the thread removal a long process?

either way, prevention would be great, more mods would be great, no spam would be great. we have a good dev team and they will sort it out I'm sure

Not sure where the "report section is bogged up" is coming from–I haven't had any issues with it and nearly always leave it empty when I'm done. I would encourage everyone who sees a spam post to report it, though. This doesn't create duplicate reports (and therefore isn't more work for us), but simply adds another report to the same report "thread". Even if a post has been there ten/twenty/thirty minutes and you figure someone has already reported it, report it, please. It's much easier (for me, at least) to go through all the reports and handle them that way than it is to manually search out all of the unreported spam. It's also much easier to see that there is spam requiring our attention when it's been reported.

And huge thanks to those of you who do consistently report spam, it is much appreciated!

Lyqyd, on 17 January 2013 - 08:12 AM said:

Not sure where the "report section is bogged up" is coming from–I haven't had any issues with it and nearly always leave it empty when I'm done. I would encourage everyone who sees a spam post to report it, though. This doesn't create duplicate reports (and therefore isn't more work for us), but simply adds another report to the same report "thread". Even if a post has been there ten/twenty/thirty minutes and you figure someone has already reported it, report it, please. It's much easier (for me, at least) to go through all the reports and handle them that way than it is to manually search out all of the unreported spam. It's also much easier to see that there is spam requiring our attention when it's been reported.

And huge thanks to those of you who do consistently report spam, it is much appreciated!

I had been leaving spam posts in the general section alone without reporting them. It's gotten to the point where I figured that the mods would normally stop in there and delete the spam there as an general procedure. I'll get back to reporting whatever I see.

Ok let's attempt to reduce spam. Give users the ability to delete their own posts. It won't stop spammers but it will help bring posts down for sure. When I was a complete noob I posted this door lock. Lol I wanted to delete it but I couldn't.

AnDwHaT5, on 22 February 2013 - 02:10 AM said:

Ok let's attempt to reduce spam. Give users the ability to delete their own posts. It won't stop spammers but it will help bring posts down for sure. When I was a complete noob I posted this door lock. Lol I wanted to delete it but I couldn't.

No. I don't want users being able to delete their own posts. For example people would just delete their 'Ask a Pro' topic when done, which can be a very good learning experience for other people.

AnDwHaT5, on 22 February 2013 - 02:10 AM said:

Ok let's attempt to reduce spam. Give users the ability to delete their own posts. It won't stop spammers but it will help bring posts down for sure. When I was a complete noob I posted this door lock. Lol I wanted to delete it but I couldn't.

It's not gonna happen. If you want your post deleted, then report it and we will get to it. Also, we want to keep Ask A Pro topics available for search in case someone else has that same question.

Cranium, on 22 February 2013 - 02:51 AM said:

AnDwHaT5, on 22 February 2013 - 02:10 AM said:

Ok let's attempt to reduce spam. Give users the ability to delete their own posts. It won't stop spammers but it will help bring posts down for sure. When I was a complete noob I posted this door lock. Lol I wanted to delete it but I couldn't.

It's not gonna happen. If you want your post deleted, then report it and we will get to it. Also, we want to keep Ask A Pro topics available for search in case someone else has that same question.

There's also the problem of trolls deleting posts which people replied to, making said people seem like mental patients, talking to themselves. This happens all too often on Facebook; I would hate to see it repeated here.

I administrate a message board for train horn collectors, and we've been spambot free now for 3 years despite using a popular freeware forum software (phpBB). Zero spambot registrations. Here is what I did, which worked wonderfully:


Piece 1: Decoy CAPTCHA:

I deliberately installed the most popular phpBB CAPTCHA plug-in, but I don't use it as is. It's there as spambot bait. CAPTCHA itself doesn't work; modern OCR software is actually better at reading it than humans are. But, it makes for an excellent way to trap spambots. Spambot scripts are programmed (hard-coded) to look for the field names of user input fields on registration pages (the identifier names of the fields in the browser DOM).

So.. I hacked the CAPTCHA plugin's php code to replace the instructions on entering the code with 1 of 10 random trivia questions about train horns, along with the instructions to humans to ignore the CAPTCHA graphic itself and simply put the answer to the trivia question into the field where you'd normally put in the alphanumeric code.

Spambots all read the code, enter it, and fail to register.

Humans sometimes don't read the instructions, and also try to enter the code, but if they do this, I give them feedback to go back and read the CAPTCHA instructions more carefully.

Piece 2: The site-specific trivia question:

The purpose of the trivia question, in place of what you may have seen on other sites, such as simple math problems (e.g. Enter the result of 4 +4 = ?) is that it screens out human spammers. I ask fairly esoteric questions that only a real train horn collector would know, and are difficult to Google the answer to. These kinds of questions are pretty easy come with, for Minecraft in general they could be something like:

"When a skeleton kills a creeper, he might drop what?" (record)
"Ghost of Notch's brother" (Herobrine)
"Pick enchantment that gets you ore blocks" (silk touch)

You get the idea.

To be honest, we are less concerned about the accounts being registered than we are about posts being successfully made. The change to using a group for new members which prevents them from starting new topics until they have made three reply posts has cut back drastically on the spam.

I'm not sure I understand your comment. I was assuming that 'spam' meant advertising bot posts (male enhancement, online pharmaceuticals, get rich quick schemes, porn sites, etc..). In this case, no successful spambot registrations = no spam posts.

If you're including new legitimate members making too many noob posts under the header of 'spam', well that is a different problem. In general, I'm not a big fan of the "must make x number of replies before starting a new topic", because it encourages new users to make 1 or 2 word replies to a bunch of topics, often bumping old threads. When I registered here, I simply couldn't post for several days, which is also user-unfriendly to the extreme. Spambots make posts withing seconds or minutes of registering, so locking out new users for 3+ days only inconveniences real people.There are ways to make it nicer for everyone, even new users. The simplest ways are to put limits on number of posts per day for a new member; say, give them 1 new topic per day when they register. You can also restrict new users to starting topics in a specific "new user" subforum.

When someone takes the effort to register as a member of a discussion forum, it's very often because they have identified the forum in question as a place to get an answer to a question they are researching. If they go through all the registration and email validation hoops, and then find that they are unable to post a new topic in any subforum… that is super frustrating. Existing users don't care, because they don't ever have to go through that again, but how you treat new users is a very important part of making an enjoyable forum and community environment.

The restrictions in place are essentially the only workable solution given the situation with the current forum software, and the extent to which we are able to modify it. The administrative team is looking into different forum software, which will hopefully give us better options in the registration process. We don't like having to inconvenience the legitimate users of the forums.

You are correct on the meaning of spam. Since we don't have the ability to prevent the registrations with the current software, the best we can do is prevent the posts from appearing. Nobody likes the current solution very much, and it is being worked on.

On the topic of new forum software, does it cost money to upgrade IP Board to 3.4.x?

tiin57, on 09 March 2013 - 05:49 AM said:

On the topic of new forum software, does it cost money to upgrade IP Board to 3.4.x?

It does. Who said we were keeping IP.Board, and, if we're even going to switch? :P/>