Serious spam on SW
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I currently have 1,057... 1,058 as of typing this, and now +2 more as I am still typing, messages notifying me of new posts to the Q&A forum. This reminds me of a while ago when they repeatedly had a problem with similar Korean spamming. Clearly there needs to be some sort of CAPTCHA counter measures or something.
I don't mean to put down SW developers or staff at all (I respect them, seriously), but even my insanely popular porn site (more popular than SW) gets almost no spam at all, simply by having very basic checks on sign up, and also login. CAPTCHA (only on sign up or sign in throttling) and DNSBL/RBL (for everything) go a hell of a long way. We also make sure when people start posting for the first time, they have limits on the amount they can post... this on top of tracking the IP addresses across multiple accounts. Sounds like a lot, but the initial implementation took less than a day and it's served us well.
Now I'm up to 1,064.
I'd post this on SW, but I'm not sure anyone would see it for now. I don't understand why policies weren't changed with the whole Korean spamming thing a long time ago. This shouldn't be possible on a site so popular.
1,067.
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It's bad enough that I mentioned it at some point yesterday, too.
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I just got into my email, damn that's a lot of spam.
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It's still happening in real time, now.
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@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
It's still happening in real time, now.
Yep, I'm up to 1,544
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@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
It's still happening in real time, now.
Yep, I'm up to 1,544
Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)
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@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
It's still happening in real time, now.
Yep, I'm up to 1,544
Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)
Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.
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@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
It's still happening in real time, now.
Yep, I'm up to 1,544
Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)
Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.
I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.
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I think there is some logic going on where they don't want to block posting in non-European alphabets in case there is a legit user in there. But has there ever been someone intentionally posting in any Asian script? I totally understand the desire not to alienate anyone, but it's to a point that it's easily the bulk of their traffic, at least much of the time, and it is alienating everyone else.
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I'm just dumping the folder at this point, no way to use the alerts any longer.
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Seven spam messages while I wrote that response.
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@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
It's still happening in real time, now.
Yep, I'm up to 1,544
Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)
Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.
I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.
I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money.
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@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
I think there is some logic going on where they don't want to block posting in non-European alphabets in case there is a legit user in there. But has there ever been someone intentionally posting in any Asian script? I totally understand the desire not to alienate anyone, but it's to a point that it's easily the bulk of their traffic, at least much of the time, and it is alienating everyone else.
We haven't had that problem at all, because basically almost all these spam bots use the same databases for open proxies and so forth, so checking against DNSDBL/RBL alone cuts down on about 90% of it. In addition to CAPTCHA for account creation, throttling, and just keeping recent post IPs in memory, it sounds more complex than it is, and it does a lot. It's completely language independent too, we get people posting in all kinds of scripts, though Cyrillic is the most used non-Latin script. We also get a lot of Japanese, in fact the Japanese language version of our site is very popular though they don't post as much; probably a cultural thing.
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@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
It's still happening in real time, now.
Yep, I'm up to 1,544
Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)
Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.
I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.
I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money.
We had the same issue here and fixed it quickly as well. And then deleted the accounts that were created to do it to clean things up.
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@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
It's still happening in real time, now.
Yep, I'm up to 1,544
Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)
Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.
I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.
I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money.
We had the same issue here and fixed it quickly as well. And then deleted the accounts that were created to do it to clean things up.
Oh definitely, the more clever bots will sit on accounts for long periods so we purge unused accounts regularly.
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@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
It's still happening in real time, now.
Yep, I'm up to 1,544
Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)
Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.
I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.
I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money.
We had the same issue here and fixed it quickly as well. And then deleted the accounts that were created to do it to clean things up.
Oh definitely, the more clever bots will sit on accounts for long periods so we purge unused accounts regularly.
Yup, same here. If an old, idle account looks suspicious, we purge them so that they don't flag as spammable later.
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@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
It's still happening in real time, now.
Yep, I'm up to 1,544
Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)
Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.
I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.
I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money.
We had the same issue here and fixed it quickly as well. And then deleted the accounts that were created to do it to clean things up.
Oh definitely, the more clever bots will sit on accounts for long periods so we purge unused accounts regularly.
Yup, same here. If an old, idle account looks suspicious, we purge them so that they don't flag as spammable later.
We can't really look at them, because there are about 2,000 account creations per day, so it's automated. The job to clean them out runs once a day, but only deletes accounts which created no content (no uploads, no comments) and haven't been active in 30 days. I think we delete probably 90 per day on average through that.
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@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
It's still happening in real time, now.
Yep, I'm up to 1,544
Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)
Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.
I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.
I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money.
We had the same issue here and fixed it quickly as well. And then deleted the accounts that were created to do it to clean things up.
Oh definitely, the more clever bots will sit on accounts for long periods so we purge unused accounts regularly.
Yup, same here. If an old, idle account looks suspicious, we purge them so that they don't flag as spammable later.
We can't really look at them, because there are about 2,000 account creations per day, so it's automated. The job to clean them out runs once a day, but only deletes accounts which created no content (no uploads, no comments) and haven't been active in 30 days. I think we delete probably 90 per day on average through that.
Still small enough to not automate here, although that's rapidly becoming impossible.
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@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
It's still happening in real time, now.
Yep, I'm up to 1,544
Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)
Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.
I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.
I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money.
We had the same issue here and fixed it quickly as well. And then deleted the accounts that were created to do it to clean things up.
Oh definitely, the more clever bots will sit on accounts for long periods so we purge unused accounts regularly.
Yup, same here. If an old, idle account looks suspicious, we purge them so that they don't flag as spammable later.
We can't really look at them, because there are about 2,000 account creations per day, so it's automated. The job to clean them out runs once a day, but only deletes accounts which created no content (no uploads, no comments) and haven't been active in 30 days. I think we delete probably 90 per day on average through that.
Still small enough to not automate here, although that's rapidly becoming impossible.
That's a good problem to have though
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I reported some of the initial Chinese posts as spam and I'm just now getting notifications they were deleted. Though, I am also getting about 2 new notifications per minute of new posts, so they aren't really fixing the problem. All the buckets in the world won't help if you don't put a pin in it.
