Spam posts flood Community - No measures possible?

[swuehl]

Dear Jason et al,

since a week or so, spam posts flood the community (well, this observation is quite obvious).

Isn't there any counter measure possible?

I remember my postings needed administrator review some times before published, so I think it should be possible to filter TV transmission ads quite easily?

I also think no one human being is able to post several new discussions within a minute or so.

Best regards,

Stefan

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your post Stefan,

I have been battling these nefarious characters all week. Your are right- its at least partially automated. We got hit especially hard over the last 24 hours. Apologies for the spam posts and emails. We are working with Vendor and IT to resolve the issues.

Feel free to flag spam posts at any time in the future! Its easier when we are not dealing with a flood of Spam.

Best Regards and thanks for your participation.

[swuehl]

Sara,

seems like you stopped spamming successfully for now and also cleaned up the forum!

Thank you and your collegues for your efforts on a weekend, it is quite annoying literally searching in the forum for real postings.

If I flag a post as spam (I guess this is the button "Report Abuse"?), will this just send an email to moderators or immediately block the post from further display?

Regards,

Stefan

[Anonymous]

Thanks Stefan,

Actually there are some other areas I'm still working on cleaning up. Yea- Report Abuse does throw it into moderation which blocks it from being visual.

I have investigated with other community managers and they have hit a number of communities. These guys are tagged the 'watch live' spammers.

BR, Sara

[Gysbert_Wassenaar]

Help! We're getting a rather obscene amount of spam on the forums right now. ... and my ban hammer doesn't work on these forums

I'm afraid your automated spam prevention/removal measures are somewhat out of date. I hope you can get this fixed soon. 

[Anonymous]

Thank you Gysbert,

I have enabled moderation throughout the community until we can block the IP addresses of the spammers. You should also see an announcement on the index page reflecting the current status. We are currently working on clean up. Thank you for your vigilence and sorry about the inconvience of the spam messages.

[Gysbert_Wassenaar]

Hello Sara,

Thanks for the effort you guys put in. I hope thing will return to normal soon. I understand the full moderation is necessary now, but it is a tad disrupting .

At forums.gentoo.org my fellow admins and I are lucky enough to have a large enough team to keep up while playing whack-a-mole with spammers. Plus we pre-ban a lot obvious spambot accounts. Still, I know from personal experience keeping forums running smoothly and spam free is a lot of work.

Perhaps your forums software supplier can add some spam mitigation features. As users we can report a post as abusive. But only one report can be made and the post/discussion will still be visible. An option could be to suspend a post or discussion if (say) three different users from three different ip numbers make a report. That would make the post or discussion invisible to users while not opening the gates totally to denial-of-service attacks by users against other users. Such a feature would give the moderator the opportunity to (more or less) at leasure take a look at the suspended posts and still have the forums not cluttered very visibly by spam in the meantime. Taking that a step further would be automatically suspending an account (for review) after an x number of suspended posts has been reached. Features like this would enable the community members to help more to keep the community clean from abuse.

Just some thoughts. Keep up the good work!

[Gysbert_Wassenaar]

The Development (QlikView Desktop) forum is getting spammered. There's about five pages of spam at this time. I hope somebody can do something before the regular workweek starts on monday. I don't think spambots bother with working hours.

Perhaps any post containing two or more external url's should always go into the review queue for moderation. That should stop just about all spam.

[kaushiknsolanki]

I agree with Gysbert about reviewing port with more then few links.

This is really sad, that we are unable to stop the spam attack on our community.

Hope our team is working on this to clean community as well as methodology to stop them in future.

Regards,

Kaushik Solanki

[Anonymous]

Thanks guys, I'm in the midst of clean up. We thought we had this under control but they found a way around.

Note this is a very organized effort on their part- they have been attacking numerous online communties and facebook pages. Its their job to find loopholes to take advantage of communities for google indexing to drive traffic to their sites.

Apologies for the inconvenience!