by PedroR » Mon Jun 03, 2013 12:41 pm
by PedroR
Mon Jun 03, 2013 12:41 pm
Hi
My post of June 2nd was actually not me but I guess someone using my PC at the office who didn't notice they were logged in as myself.
Anyway, to answer your messages, if you read back on my posts there was a discussion on how to address the aggressive spam attack we were under last Christmas.
At the moment several layers of protection are in place:
1) New users are forbidden from posting links in their first posts. This is quite annoying for new users and they sometimes complain but this is the best we could do.
2) There is post throttling for new users: new users can only post a very limited number of posts per day until they go up in rank.
This is meant to throttle down spam activity and proliferation at times when the forum is unsupervised.
3) Finally there is IP cross-checking on banned accounts/deleted posts: if posts from a certain IP have been removed or users banned in the last days there's further throttling of posting and hardening of posting limits (up to automatic suspension of posting from that IP).
All the above are automatic levels of protection.
However as i-Bot mentioned, spammers are very clever and have very sophisticated systems:
You'll noticed for example the generic posts on threads saying "very nice", "great work"; most of these are spammers working their way up in rank to be able to then post URLs.
However because we can't be certain if they are spammers or legitimate users, most of the time we let this go until they actually spam, and ultimately get banned.
There has also been a debate about improving the captcha system although, from experience, spammers are so sophisticated today that it does very little to prevent it.
What appeals to spammers on our forum is is probably the good google ranking. By association, spamming us is always better than spamming some unknown or a poorly ranked forum.
We'd expect that with all these measures in place, by now spammers would have realized it's not worth the effort but they keep coming for some weird reason and we keep fighting back the best we can.
(the next step would be manual approval of posts which we do not agree with as it throttles and delays user interaction, so we're not going there yet).
Best,
Pedro
Hi
My post of June 2nd was actually not me but I guess someone using my PC at the office who didn't notice they were logged in as myself.
Anyway, to answer your messages, if you read back on my posts there was a discussion on how to address the aggressive spam attack we were under last Christmas.
At the moment several layers of protection are in place:
1) New users are forbidden from posting links in their first posts. This is quite annoying for new users and they sometimes complain but this is the best we could do.
2) There is post throttling for new users: new users can only post a very limited number of posts per day until they go up in rank.
This is meant to throttle down spam activity and proliferation at times when the forum is unsupervised.
3) Finally there is IP cross-checking on banned accounts/deleted posts: if posts from a certain IP have been removed or users banned in the last days there's further throttling of posting and hardening of posting limits (up to automatic suspension of posting from that IP).
All the above are automatic levels of protection.
However as i-Bot mentioned, spammers are very clever and have very sophisticated systems:
You'll noticed for example the generic posts on threads saying "very nice", "great work"; most of these are spammers working their way up in rank to be able to then post URLs.
However because we can't be certain if they are spammers or legitimate users, most of the time we let this go until they actually spam, and ultimately get banned.
There has also been a debate about improving the captcha system although, from experience, spammers are so sophisticated today that it does very little to prevent it.
What appeals to spammers on our forum is is probably the good google ranking. By association, spamming us is always better than spamming some unknown or a poorly ranked forum.
We'd expect that with all these measures in place, by now spammers would have realized it's not worth the effort but they keep coming for some weird reason and we keep fighting back the best we can.
(the next step would be manual approval of posts which we do not agree with as it throttles and delays user interaction, so we're not going there yet).
Best,
Pedro