Recent spam boom

C4DS

Everyone browsing this forum has probably noticed that the amount of spam has increased recently.
I have done my best to flag every post I come across of ... and it is quite easily to distinguish spam post from others from the subject line alone. Unfortunately, in order to flag the post one need to open it.

Anyway, I understand the SDK support team has more than enough things on their mind, helping out people genuinely looking for help, that they cannot find the time to look into solutions to prevent spamming.
I am more than happy to flag the posts, but that is all I can do, flag.

While I don't want to add even more work into your (SDK support) hands, here might be some advice or suggestion that could help in reducing said spam.
People seem to simply register an account, and immediately post spam ... and never to be seen again afterwards.
So, apart from removing the spam post, why not simply delete the account. Maybe even banning if that is possible.
The other suggestion I have is that it might be worthwhile to introduce a delay before a new user can post its first message after having created an account. Let's say 24 hours (just a suggestion), by the time the account/user is allowed to post he/she has already moved on.
But seriously, try to delete these spammer-accounts before the database gets so crowded it does affect the whole forum.

Thanks for reading.

ferdinand

Hi,

the problem is that nodeBB is a very popular forum platform and therefore is being target by many spammers and also the history of a more or less laisser-faire approach on malicious content of the forum administration has probably earned the cafe a solid spot in the easy targets lists going around.

Deleting accounts won't help much, because accounts are usually used only for one posting and the threshold before the database is getting saturated under the sheer amount of accounts is pretty high.

The most straightforward approach for dealing with spam would be installing an anti-spam plugin (like for example spam-be-gone), but here you are always fighting false positives (preventing legitimate postings) and also burden the legitimate user with things like captchas (depending on the plugin settings). Sometimes it can be better to use just a whitelist of domains that are allowed to be referenced in postings.

Cheers
zipit

r_gigante

Hi guys, thanks for your comments on the topic. We do appreciate your effort in trying to keep this place tidy and clean.

We've considered a few options and a better spam-prevention mechanism are now in place.

Cheers, R

C4DS

spam frenzy all over again, lately.

C4DS

May I again suggest to provide a way to prevent anyone creating an account to start spamming around.
I had provided some suggestions in my first post, like not allowing to post right after having created an account.

I don't mind flagging the offending posts as spam, but it might probably be more efficient to prevent spamming in the first place.

Thanks again for your time.

ferdinand

Hi @C4DS,

thank you for bringing this topic up and thank you for making the effort of flagging spam. We actually have a spam protection in place, but it is not trivial to "prevent spamming in the first place". We have slightly improved our spam-protection and will monitor the effect of it.

There are other options and we have discussed them, but we are a bit hesitant to implement them, because they impose restrictions on existing users. Like the restriction you did propose or the one I did propose above. I cannot say much more than that we have this on our radar and might take further steps when we feel the situation is getting out of control.

Thanks again for bringing it up.

Cheers,
Ferdinand