Slammed today

[mikeschn]

We got slammed today, by spammers. It was quite the challenge to get rid of them all. Even had to take the forum down for a couple hours.

Thanks for being patient. I think we got them all.

Mike...

[Wobbly Wheels]

Good work Mike, and thanks again for all the time you put in to give us a clubhouse

[Esteban]

Good work Mike, and thanks again for all the time you put in to give us a clubhouse

Seconded!

Figured TNTTT was down for a time today to do a thorough fumigation. Hope you deleted all the spammers and their spam. And that you have come up with better ways to deter and defeat them in the future.

Is there a means or mechanism to report spammy members, not just their posts, to the moderators?

[Breytie]

Good work Mike, and thanks again for all the time you put in to give us a clubhouse

Seconded!

Figured TNTTT was down for a time today to do a thorough fumigation. Hope you deleted all the spammers and their spam. And that you have come up with better ways to deter and defeat them in the future.

Is there a means or mechanism to report spammy members, not just their posts, to the moderators?

+1 on all counts!
I tip my hat to the admins. How many users and posts did you take down in that storm?
A good idea may be to automatically temporary lock a user that gets 3 or 5 posts flagged in a day? That should slow things down enough so that the admins can catch up and sorta keep up when it happens again.

Another idea may be to limit new users to 1 post a day for a week?
Again, thanks guys!

[felixx]

Good work Sir

[mikeschn]

Good ideas. Let me investigate and see which of them can be implemented.

The biggest problem is, the spammers don't use the forum software. They have their own software which writes directly into the forum database. So once they are signed up, they pretty much have free reign. They can circumvent most of the forum rules, like limits of 1 post per day, etc.


Okay, I've added a button under Forum Problems, called "Spammers". This will send an email to myself and the admins that are watching for spammers.

Just include the name of the spammers, and we'll find them and squash them.

Mike...

[Verna]

Mike, I use Tapatalk most of the time and I don't see a way to report spam or spammers names. The drop down menu doesn't include that choice. Can it be added, please? Thanks for all you do. I know it's hard being an Admin.

[dales133]

Hi Verna my word game compadre, I have a report listing on my tapatalk drop down menu that works on some forums not sure about here... maybe someone can advise

[Verna]

Mikesch, I just figured out if I touch the user name I get a menu that includes "report". So, the function is there to report a specific spammer/user. Take a break-you guys need it after yesterday.

[legojenn]

Maybe I'm just too literal of a thinker, but I wish I understood the motivation of forum spammers. The ones I reported yesterday were Russian and focussed on gambling. I understand that a lot of the spamming is automated, so the spammers did not know that they were hitting an English-language site about camping, populated mostly by people in the US. I don't see what the spammers would even gain by advertising here. They aren't going to sell anything and I can't imagine that the pages would get enough views, let alone clicks for an advertiser to even pay for the service. At least with emailing and robo-calling, the spammers are casting a wide and diverse net. Web forums can be pretty small and specialised. For a tool that needs to send out tens of thousands of messages to get a sucker, this just seems like the worst place for results.

[MtnDon]

A lot of forum spam, probably the bulk of it, is directed at the search engine robots, like Google, Bing, MSN, etc. and not individual viewers. The premise is the search engines will "see" the links to those sites. The more different sites the search engine robots find links on, the higher the page ranking. If the forum spam posts are far off topic it is a virtual certainty the spam and the links are directed at the search engine robots. It's very cheap to produce with the automated software. Anyone can buy different levels of the software for $170, $450 or $700 from an outfit in Russia. It can do amazing things. Nothing that we want, but amazing all the same.

[capnTelescope]

A lot of forum spam, probably the bulk of it, is directed at the search engine robots ...

Suddenly, everything became crystal clear. Thank you, MtnDon

I said it in the other thread, but I'll say it here, too: Great job, Moderators

[jss06]

Great job guys. I am a mod on a different forum and know how much of a pain it is.

[Shadow Catcher]

The efforts to squash this sort of thing is appreciated!