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Thread: Ridiculous time delay for posts

  1. #21

    Join Date
    Dec 2005
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    El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula
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    5,808

    Re: Ridiculous time delay for posts

    Quote Originally Posted by Vaughn View Post
    It is not that big of a problem to require more work by the mods. Dang...it is not even a big enough problem for me to be posting about it.
    We see!

  2. #22

    Join Date
    Nov 2009
    Location
    Wageningen, The Netherlands
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    48

    Re: Ridiculous time delay for posts

    I think people underestimate just how industrial and financially driven the spam business is. Spammers go to work every day just like the rest of us. Getting around anti spam measures is their job. If there's money to be made in them generating thousands of disposable email addresses (trivially easy), or automated delay timers (to get round 'can't post for _x_ days' protocols) they will.

    The only thing to do is to put in the time and effort to making their lives just that much less profitable, and their businesses that much less viable.

  3. #23

    Join Date
    Aug 2015
    Location
    Yorkshire, England.
    Posts
    16

    Re: Ridiculous time delay for posts

    I'm an (abominably lazy) admin at Camera-wiki. We are a small site, but were developing a large spam problem for our size; enough that most of what the admins were doing on the site was deleting spam and blocking spammers, instead of researching or writing for the wiki. There was little satisfaction or pleasure left in being involved in the site.

    A large fraction of our spammers were usernames which conformed to a standard pattern, clearly generated by a program from a list of possible human names. One thing we started doing was deleting any usernames that fitted that pattern, before they spammed. I guess some of that work might have been done for us if we had the knowledge to sign up to something like Spam-o-matic as you have here. Certainly, the stats quoted on the front page here suggest it's a very worthwhile measure.

    Also, we have a Bot that puts a welcome message on a new user's Talk page; we started having one of the admins add a second message, which said in polite terms 'Welcome, but write something soon or get blocked', and after a short while, we went back and did that. Otherwise, we were building up a long membership list of spammers' spare usernames, which couldn't ever be used, because they'd been generated from an IP address that had been used for spamming, but their existence offended our ideas of tidiness (and if the IP blocks had ever been lost, we'd have been in deep do-do, I guess).

    Still, as Halford says, the spammers don't notice what we do or care about it, and they kept on registering. What we have done in the end is disable new registrations. People wanting to edit in the wiki have to contact an admin (via another site even, since you can't use the wiki's 'mail this user' feature until you're registered!). We have registered only two new users in several months since that change; but spam has ceased.

    It seems to me your systems work. I only see a few spam posts per week myself, and the few I've reported were gone in a few minutes. I doubt LFPF is getting significant traffic to the spammers' links, and I doubt they spend those few minutes gloating over their presence here; it's pointless to spend our time fuming about it.

  4. #24
    8x10, 5x7, 4x5, et al Leigh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2010
    Location
    Maryland, USA
    Posts
    5,454

    Re: Ridiculous time delay for posts

    I'm a moderator at www.PracticalMachinist.com

    With over 10.6 million unique visitors in the past year, it's the world's largest website devoted to the machinist trade and related manufacturing subjects.

    We have no visible spam problem that I've ever seen. I'll try to find out why not.

    - Leigh
    If you believe you can, or you believe you can't... you're right.

  5. #25

    Join Date
    Oct 2013
    Location
    Maryland
    Posts
    1,490

    Re: Ridiculous time delay for posts

    If the forum software allowed for text-based scanning software to process each post before actually posting it, some very simple text and regular expression matching algorithms could probably filter out 95% of the traditional spammers who keep hitting this forum. Scanning scripts written in Javascript, Python or even PHP could handle this quite simply, and it wouldn't matter how many fake registrations the spammers use, because the scanner would look at the contents of what they try to post, not the registrant's name or email address. I would be surprised if current forum software didn't have such a capability built in. So that's a long way of suggesting that the forum software here may be too out of date to adequately handle this type of problem. Without the ability to build in some intelligence in the forum software, the problem with spammers will only get worse.

  6. #26

    Join Date
    Nov 1999
    Location
    San Clemente, California
    Posts
    3,804

    Re: Ridiculous time delay for posts

    Quote Originally Posted by Sal Santamaura View Post
    Drew has only ever participated here from his computer at work. He's advised us he's retiring in one week. He previously said he wouldn't be posting after he retires. We'll see.
    Drew hasn't resumed posting yet, but did log in on January 27 for the first time since retiring December 16. Can his renewed participation be expected soon? We'll see.

  7. #27
    Tin Can's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Posts
    22,383

    Re: Ridiculous time delay for posts

    Retirement is hard to adjust to, takes a while. Took me years to even realize I was retired...

    I wager Drew will be back...

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