Spam problems

[nutcracker]

Sounds good, but many people might miss the thread and not pay attention, you'd need to have a proper path.

[Freshbite]

If you haven't posted anything, that thread would be the only visible thread. Or when you try to post, it says "NO", and links you to that thread.

I am for it, +1.

[Grayswandir]

Just make a new section called "Welcome" with the subject: "Please reply in here first" then make a welcome thread for people to reply to but lock the entire section from new thread creation. Make the new section the only area users with zero posts can see.

[Freshbite]

I think users should be able to see, atleast, but cannot post in any other section than the Welcome section. I was thinking mostly of the ones with problems with Lugaru, they should be able to search for a solution without having to register for an account.

[Venatir]

Find member - 0 post count - sort by join date

Could someone to manually creating all these accounts?

Can we stop it from making more accounts?

[Pavke]

You think you guys have a spam problem? You should have seen 2DBoy(World of Goo) forum spam attack. Its not active since few weeks ago but before that it would get about 1000 spam accounts a day.
Last time a checked forum had 190,000 accounts witch is more than some World of Warcraft forums
Forum is now being moved and the interesting part is that account data is twice as large than the actual forum data.

[philcrumm]

Find member - 0 post count - sort by join date

Could someone to manually creating all these accounts?

Can we stop it from making more accounts?

There is no single source for these spam accounts.

[BlackHole]

Yeah, spammers are taking more and more time to deal with. Now, all we have to do is wait until they realize that they can preorder, spam and then approve their own posts!

At my own forums, I'm working on implementing a combined banning system. That means, we're streaming like 20 banning databases from all over the world, combine these with our own data and predict the chances of someone being a "bad guy". If you have enough penalty points, you cannot auto-register but your account at the forums first has to be approved by one of the mods.
Best thing of all is, that we can combine it with our gameservers. So, cheating in our servers may get you banned from our forums, and spamming on our forums may get you banned from our gameservers.

Maybe something like this could be useful for here? There are quite a few free, community-based ban databases our there, for example this one, based on which for example registration requires approval.

EDIT: Fellow spam police officers, be warned: I've noticed quite a few spammers now started using birthdays. Register, put in a birthday which is like 7 days ahead, and on that day, a free link to your profile (which of course is filled with spam) on the forum homepage!
Don't let them rejoice, use your banhammers!

~ Black
Only the dead have seen the end of war.

[Freshbite]

I think account approval would be better than post approval.
Many spammers seems to be fine with just making an account, with advertisement in their profile.

[nutcracker]

*Agrees with the swede above*

[philcrumm]

There are quite a few free, community-based ban databases our there, for example this one, based on which for example registration requires approval.

The problem with DNSBL-type solutions is that they have the tendency to produce a non-trivial number of false positives; this can be quite aggravating to the end user and ought to be avoided

[Jacktheawesome]

Just shot down two advertisers, my first two. It is kinda fun isn't it? <-evil laugh

[BlackHole]

The problem with DNSBL-type solutions is that they have the tendency to produce a non-trivial number of false positives; this can be quite aggravating to the end user and ought to be avoided

Well, in the current scenario, all users firsts posts have to be approved. What if you switch to account approval based on databases like these, and if a account was approved by a mod, make the first-post approval no longer required.

There wouldn't be much difference for users; they still have to wait until either their account or post is approved. Of course, upon entering a valid preorderer-key, both account- and firstpost-approval can be skipped, thus the system will not annoy any customers.

And, from a moderator/admin point of view, I'd be much easier to find and disapprove spammer accounts. Since the increasing number of bots just creating accounts, but not posting anything to avoid suspicion (see my above post about the birthday trick) this would make our lives a little bit easier.

So basically:

• If a new account does match to one of the databases: the account requires approval. If approved, first-post approval may not be required.
• If a new account does not to one of the databases: the account is automatically approved, but first post approval is required.
• If a new account is a spammer, we can easily spot and remove it, before it even has the chance to post or show up using one of their other sneaky tricks.
• If a new account is a normal user, they'll have to wait for either account- or post-approval. In all cases they'll have to wait, so there won't be very much difference.

I've deployed it on my own forums for some time not, and it works pretty well. Sure, it results some false positives, but in the end, the number of spammers stopped by this method is still higher than the number of false positives I receive.

EDIT: Another thing: would it be possible to hide the profiles of banned users? For example, when someone browses the userlist now, there's still a massive amount of spam. *example*
Or at least, make it visible if a user has already been banned. That makes it easier for us spam police to see which ones other officers already caught, and which ones survived.

~ Black
Only the dead have seen the end of war.

[Venatir]

Get an IP blacklist

get something better than CAPTCHA, because any fool could dl XRumer. No human could get past that anyway

[Jacktheawesome]

Are there no new legit posters? Seriously I havn't been able to approve a single post yet! Is the spam problem really that bad, or is it that only suspicious looking users have to receive post authorization, or what?