New Spam Control System installed on the Forum
New Spam Control System installed on the Forum
by PedroR
Mon Nov 05, 2012 5:34 pm
Hi all
In face of the recent and aggressive attack of Spammers to our forum, we were forced to implement very tight Spam Control Mechanisms.
These checks and mechanisms should apply to new users only (i.e. users with 10 posts or less) and include a number of restrictions such as:
- Prohibition to post links in the first 2 posts made by a new user.
- Throttle down posting on new user accounts to only a couple of posts per hour.
- Correlating activity by IP address and further throttling down new users if we find activity from other accounts originating from the same IP address.
(this last one is tricky because of NAT)
These measures will hopefully mitigate the attack we've been under in the past weeks.
The filter should not affect veteran users.
We're keeping a close eye on the forum to fine tune the filter but if you notice the Spam filter is forbidding your (legitimate) posts please let us know.
The Community Forum and your contribution is very important to us. We do our best to make it a pleasant, healthy and spam free space to share your thoughts and ideas.
In case you encounter any issue when posting please please email webmaster@robosavvy.com and we'll make sure to fix it.
Kind Regards
Pedro
In face of the recent and aggressive attack of Spammers to our forum, we were forced to implement very tight Spam Control Mechanisms.
These checks and mechanisms should apply to new users only (i.e. users with 10 posts or less) and include a number of restrictions such as:
- Prohibition to post links in the first 2 posts made by a new user.
- Throttle down posting on new user accounts to only a couple of posts per hour.
- Correlating activity by IP address and further throttling down new users if we find activity from other accounts originating from the same IP address.
(this last one is tricky because of NAT)
These measures will hopefully mitigate the attack we've been under in the past weeks.
The filter should not affect veteran users.
We're keeping a close eye on the forum to fine tune the filter but if you notice the Spam filter is forbidding your (legitimate) posts please let us know.
The Community Forum and your contribution is very important to us. We do our best to make it a pleasant, healthy and spam free space to share your thoughts and ideas.
In case you encounter any issue when posting please please email webmaster@robosavvy.com and we'll make sure to fix it.
Kind Regards
Pedro
by PedroR
Tue Nov 06, 2012 12:38 pm
Hi wiweet
Thank you for your post. Hopefully other users will feel the same way.
I just wanted to make a quick post to let you all know that after analysing the (more calm) overnight spam attack we've further tuned the spam filtering system.
More restrictive checks have been put in place for new users.
Again, they should not affect veteran users.
While this can't prevent spam 100% (I think no system can), I'm confident a combination of human moderation and post throttling should get spam under control.
If not we still have a few more mechanisms to resort to.
As a side note, these spam attacks are getting quite sophisticated from what I can see: distributed spam origin from multiple IPs, making generic, harmless (and meaningless) posts to patiently wait to increase rank (and surpass the new user restrictions) , etc.
If the new system is affecting your (legitimate) posting please let us know by emailing webmaster@robosavvy.com
The system is supposed to throttle down spammers only; we don't want to harm genuine users
those are very welcome!
Regards
Pedro.
Thank you for your post. Hopefully other users will feel the same way.
I just wanted to make a quick post to let you all know that after analysing the (more calm) overnight spam attack we've further tuned the spam filtering system.
More restrictive checks have been put in place for new users.
Again, they should not affect veteran users.
While this can't prevent spam 100% (I think no system can), I'm confident a combination of human moderation and post throttling should get spam under control.
If not we still have a few more mechanisms to resort to.
As a side note, these spam attacks are getting quite sophisticated from what I can see: distributed spam origin from multiple IPs, making generic, harmless (and meaningless) posts to patiently wait to increase rank (and surpass the new user restrictions) , etc.
If the new system is affecting your (legitimate) posting please let us know by emailing webmaster@robosavvy.com
The system is supposed to throttle down spammers only; we don't want to harm genuine users
those are very welcome!
Regards
Pedro.
by PedroR
Wed Nov 07, 2012 1:10 pm
Hi all
Once again, after looking at last night's spam attack we've added a new layer of analysis for spam.
We've also hardened the IP address checks so if you are behind a firewall or NAT system and experience issues when posting, please let us know.
IP checks are always a tricky thing to do because companies and some ISPs employ NAT, meaning multiple users will all look the same to us as they all share the same IP address.
We've taken careful steps to avoid inadvertently restricting legitimate users, but again, if you experience any issues we'd be very happy to get your feedback; just email us at webmaster@robosavvy.com
Regards
Pedro.
Once again, after looking at last night's spam attack we've added a new layer of analysis for spam.
We've also hardened the IP address checks so if you are behind a firewall or NAT system and experience issues when posting, please let us know.
IP checks are always a tricky thing to do because companies and some ISPs employ NAT, meaning multiple users will all look the same to us as they all share the same IP address.
We've taken careful steps to avoid inadvertently restricting legitimate users, but again, if you experience any issues we'd be very happy to get your feedback; just email us at webmaster@robosavvy.com
Regards
Pedro.