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Author: Subject: Tired of reporting spam
Bert
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[*] posted on 10-8-2014 at 18:11




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Rapopart’s Rules for critical commentary:

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4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

Anatol Rapoport was a Russian-born American mathematical psychologist (1911-2007).

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[*] posted on 10-8-2014 at 19:39


They tried it earlier again today. I don't know what it was, looked like two of us was on it like stink on you know what and before I got down through 6 posts it came back error and was ALLL GONE. LOL
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[*] posted on 11-9-2014 at 13:33


So what is this ? These aren't listed members and there is no post

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[*] posted on 11-9-2014 at 14:02


I think it's what I was talking about here:
Quote: Originally posted by zts16  
Wow, well that automatic deletion thing seems to be working perfectly. I have only seen one spam post since it was implemented, and it no longer existed by the time I hit the report button on it.
The only issue I have is that it still displays the spammer as the last poster in a subforum, which tends to be confusing when checking to see if there are any new posts. It's such a minor cosmetic issue though, if there's no easy solution, it's not something worth fixing.
I thought that the issue had gotten fixed at some point, but apparently it hasn't.



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The Volatile Chemist
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[*] posted on 11-9-2014 at 14:47


Bert, that's the best usage of a clip/quote 2014. Man, hilarious. But our procedures seem to be working.



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Polverone
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[*] posted on 15-9-2014 at 14:26


I hope that our upgraded spam defenses are able to cope with the change I am making: I am disabling the requirement for a valid email address to sign up. I have received too many reports of registration attempts failing because confirmation mail is never delivered from SM to the would-be member. This is due to mail services blocking outgoing mail from sciencemadness since we had our mail server temporarily taken over by email spammers last year.

I am guessing that many attempted signups fail and after that initial effort would-be members do not make a second attempt. So I am going to turn that off for now to avoid blocking legitimate signups, and hope that our anti-spam defenses are good enough to handle the change.




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Brain&Force
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[*] posted on 15-9-2014 at 17:28


And we get a burst of plenty of spam accounts...but no extra spam.



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[*] posted on 16-9-2014 at 03:11


No kidding, at the time of posting this there were 31 spam accounts logged in out of 34 total users:o

[Edited on 16-9-2014 by gdflp]
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Brain&Force
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[*] posted on 16-9-2014 at 11:27


You'd think these spammer would be smart enough to include "amateur science" as one of their hobbies...

If anyone finds an account that lists it as a hobby, post it here.




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[*] posted on 16-9-2014 at 13:23


S how come I got deleted? Little_Ghost gone!!! all my posts gone :(. was this a spam thing or did I just get banned and not told?
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[*] posted on 16-9-2014 at 14:33


I'm sorry Little_Ghost_again, as I said in U2U it is possible that your account was accidentally auto-deleted by anti-spam measures. So far the spammers have been stupid enough to never mix non-spammy links into their posts, but it is possible they are now adding 'legit' links that could lead to legitimate new users being deleted if there is overlap.

EDIT: I have temporarily disabled auto-deletion until I can figure out why I got a false positive on Little_Ghost. Expect to see some spam clogging up the site in the mean time :(

[Edited on 9-16-2014 by Polverone]




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Polverone
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[*] posted on 16-9-2014 at 15:05


Oh, what a sad mistake. I didn't have a check for minimum bad-link length. Some how one spammer ended up with a link that was just 'http', no following destination. That meant that a plain mention of http in a Little_Ghost post was enough to get him zapped, since he was recently registered. I don't have a way to restore his threads/posts, but I have added checks to prevent it from happening again.



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[*] posted on 17-9-2014 at 05:03


apparently the spam software was loosened to much. We are being overrun by spam now.

Come on folks, if no one reports the spam as spam then the software can never kick in.

[Edited on 17-9-2014 by hyfalcon]
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Bert
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[*] posted on 17-9-2014 at 05:31


I'd say the requirement for a valid email address is worth reapplying...



Rapopart’s Rules for critical commentary:

1. Attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

Anatol Rapoport was a Russian-born American mathematical psychologist (1911-2007).

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froot
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[*] posted on 17-9-2014 at 05:54


Has anyone noticed if spam bots post immediately after registering or not?

If Little_Ghost had a number of posts on the board his account must've had a filterable age to it.

Apply the unforgiving spam filtering to accounts that are within say 12 hours old, then ease up to a more cautious filtering algorithm once they make it past that age without posting crap.


Edit:

If possible you can also move all 'deleted' posts to an invisible section that auto-deletes all content older than say 48 hours, providing you with a safety net to catch any posts by new members that the filtering misidentified. Email confirmations can then be turned off and spam code turned on.

[Edited on 17-9-2014 by froot]




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confused
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[*] posted on 18-9-2014 at 18:52


what is the criteria for the spam filter to work, must people report the posts or does it magic the spam away?

Im assuming it also gathers information from previous spam posts to determine what future spammer's posts and accounts to delete.
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[*] posted on 18-9-2014 at 20:04


goddamned thankless job--THANX Polv and Woelen........



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[*] posted on 18-9-2014 at 21:48


Quote: Originally posted by arkoma  
goddamned thankless job--THANX Polv and Woelen........


Amen to that!

Is there any way to auto-delete post titles or accounts containing Chinese characters? I don't see any legitimate posts containing them.




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[*] posted on 19-9-2014 at 00:04


Wouldnt a simple catchpa significantly reduce the amount of spam accounts? Pretty much all forums uses it, why is it not used on Science madness?
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[*] posted on 19-9-2014 at 07:26


I have terrible luck with captchas, always get them wrong, it appears that my image reccognition software isn't up to date :D

just to check, it still works to report spam posts as spam right?
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[*] posted on 21-9-2014 at 13:40


That's interesting, I just reported a spam post where the spammer posted, and then unregistered. What's the point of that?
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[*] posted on 21-9-2014 at 14:45


There's a bug related to certain non-Latin characters showing up in spammer posts or profiles, where the spammer account gets deleted but the spam post remains because my script chokes on the extra characters. I haven't managed to catch it in progress yet to figure out where the problem is.

The big spam wave that hung around earlier today was because one spammer had a profile like that that was blocking all spam removal operations from completing. I fixed it enough to unblock the process but there's still more work to do.




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Brain&Force
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[*] posted on 21-9-2014 at 15:22


Polverone, did you allow unregistered users to post?



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Polverone
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[*] posted on 21-9-2014 at 15:31


No, that's the problem I am talking about. The script gets far enough to delete the spammer account but their actual posts are left lingering because something interrupts the script before it cleans up their posts.



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[*] posted on 21-9-2014 at 22:11
How the hell can these creeps be locked out.


Is it that simple to post so much spam, so quickly? Guess so; this does not look good.

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