• From: Lake Erie, Dunkirk, NY
  • Registered: 2005-03-11
  • Posts: 272

Topic: spam

Adrian,  I am afraid our webpage is starting to be invaded with spam.  My sister had one of these people mess up a site like ours and eventually close it down.  I am unsure if we can do anything about it but the last person to sign up was a spammer.
jklee

  • Jim
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2005-03-14
  • Posts: 24

Re: spam

Adrian:

GREAT job that you have been doing with the site.

The spam invasion seems to be daily now.

I was wondering if it is possible to prevent new registrants from posting on the day of their registration.  Could new registrants be required to wait 24 hrs before posting? And might this limit the number of spammers?

Thanks for the hard work.

Jim

  • Registered: 2006-09-20
  • Posts: 175

Re: spam

Maybe if there was some way of voting spammers off?  If all users who've been here more than 3 months and made more than 10 posts got a 'this is spam' button when we read a new post, which could be used to remove the offending post if  enough of us click it.  Get three posts voted as spam within a week and that user gets deleted as well.  If the votes required are carefully chosen to be an appropriate proportion of the usual daily visitors, there would be virtually no risk of abuse.

Also if the *same* message is posted to three or more forums during their first 24 hours membership they are a cut & paste spammer and the best solution is to auto-wipe their posts and account.  You'd also need to ban the IP address.  It would be best to delay the wipe five minutes or so so they *think* its worked and  dont work out how to defeat it,

Remember, Spammers are Stupid, so it doesn't take much to program the server to be more intelligent than them . . . .

  • Adrian
  • Adrian
  • Administrator
  • Offline
  • From: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  • Registered: 2005-04-18
  • Posts: 542

Re: spam

I am working on some more solutions. Unfortunately just keeping the spam off the site is taking a considerable amount of time. Also, I have to admit that daily life is currently impinging on the time I spend maintaining this site.

But rest assured I am working on it. If its any consolation, only about 8% of the spam is actually getting through. I've managed to automatically blog the other 92%. That gives you some idea of how much spam there is.

The best thing to do right now for you guys is to not click on spam. Just leave it be and I'll keep working on the filtering.

Thanks guys!

Adrian's Website

  • Registered: 2006-09-20
  • Posts: 175

Re: spam