Serious spam on SW
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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.
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@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
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.
I got 21 during the last paragraph. It has to be easy to fix this.... how do they stop it each time? Do they just ignore it and it stops after a few hours? Do they block it and they find a new way it? It's odd how it keeps going, but isn't eternal.
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@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
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.
I got 21 during the last paragraph. It has to be easy to fix this.... how do they stop it each time? Do they just ignore it and it stops after a few hours? Do they block it and they find a new way it? It's odd how it keeps going, but isn't eternal.
I figured they maybe blocked the IP addresses being used and the bots give up with that combined with their posts being deleted. Certainly it's completely automated so even a CAPTCHA would do wonders, and they don't even have that.
8 new ones whilst writing 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:
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.
I got 21 during the last paragraph. It has to be easy to fix this.... how do they stop it each time? Do they just ignore it and it stops after a few hours? Do they block it and they find a new way it? It's odd how it keeps going, but isn't eternal.
I figured they maybe blocked the IP addresses being used and the bots give up with that combined with their posts being deleted. Certainly it's completely automated so even a CAPTCHA would do wonders, and they don't even have that.
8 new ones whilst writing that.
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:
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.
I got 21 during the last paragraph. It has to be easy to fix this.... how do they stop it each time? Do they just ignore it and it stops after a few hours? Do they block it and they find a new way it? It's odd how it keeps going, but isn't eternal.
I figured they maybe blocked the IP addresses being used and the bots give up with that combined with their posts being deleted. Certainly it's completely automated so even a CAPTCHA would do wonders, and they don't even have that.
8 new ones whilst writing that.
Oh right, might be a single IP address.
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Looks like they managed to get it stopped around 12:36PM EST.
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It begins again, guess they didn't fix it (no duh).
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Add ReCAPTCHA or something, jeeze!
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I don't see any of these "spam" postings. Are they located in a specific category or group?
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@Danp said in Serious spam on SW:
I don't see any of these "spam" postings. Are they located in a specific category or group?
They get deleted, if you had email notifications you should have been swamped. If not, their mods run around deleting them as fast as they can.
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@scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:
@Danp said in Serious spam on SW:
I don't see any of these "spam" postings. Are they located in a specific category or group?
They get deleted, if you had email notifications you should have been swamped. If not, their mods run around deleting them as fast as they can.
Yes, exactly, I receive 2,583 notifications so far. Plus also I posted a screen shot at the top of what it looks like before they get deleted.
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They were deleted users like crazy, too.
