Handing Spam

[sun burn]

I see you guys might be feeling snowed under by the spam.

Here's a suggestion. This is what they do on my travel forum.

Let everything through. Use the readers of the forum to be your vetters. Encourage the readers to notify the mods of spammers and then you guys delete the spam.

If you go this road you need to make it easy for us to notify you of any spammers. The old method in my forum was to send a private message to the moderator with a link or even just the name of the spammer.

The new method is that in the top right of all messages are some options and one includes reporting spam. Once the thread is opened that button becomes available and by clicking on it and sending that message, the mods are notified.

I guess a bit of tech work is involved in setting that up.

The key to making this work either way is to ensure that your regulars are willing to help you by notifying the mods of the presence of spammers.

[ecodharmamark]

I see you guys might be feeling snowed under by the spam.

Here's a suggestion. This is what they do on my travel forum.

Let everything through. Use the readers of the forum to be your vetters. Encourage the readers to notify the mods of spammers and then you guys delete the spam.

If you go this road you need to make it easy for us to notify you of any spammers. The old method in my forum was to send a private message to the moderator with a link or even just the name of the spammer.

The new method is that in the top right of all messages are some options and one includes reporting spam. Once the thread is opened that button becomes available and by clicking on it and sending that message, the mods are notified.

I guess a bit of tech work is involved in setting that up.

The key to making this work either way is to ensure that your regulars are willing to help you by notifying the mods of the presence of spammers.

Um, thanks for that, sun burn.

The 'new method' that you write of in relation to another forum, is actually the old method that we use here. If you have a close look at any post in the bottom left-hand corner, you will see a small symbol (black 'triangle' with a white 'apostrophe mark' inside of it). Hit this symbol to 'report post'. The mods will then pic it up and make the appropriate call as to whether it is spam or not.

I guess where the mods have been feeling snowed under of late, is with the 1,000s of 'bots' that have been signing up in previous weeks. This activity now seems to have died down, and is probably due to the new sign-up 'questioning system'.

Anyway, thanks (as always), Markos

Cheerio, Markos

[sun burn]

oh well it would help if people knew about it. I certainly didn't and I can't see any way that I could have learned about it except what has happened. The symbol itself totally escaped my notice and I would have ignored it if i had noticed since it doesn't look like anything that means anything much to me. Obviously its not quite the same system on this forum as on the other, if they are screening all newbies here. No one screens the newbies on the other forums i am on. I am making this suggestion for the obvious reason that legitimate new posts and and newbies are not getting through fast enough.

[pebble]

It seems like lots of new people are joining all the time and getting on ok. I don't think it's too much to ask that people (a) don't post links in their first 1 or 2 posts, and (b) that they have to be approved before their first post appears. This is standard on many forums and other formats like blogs.

Patience is a requirement for practicing and learning permaculture I would have thought ;-).

btw, the UK and French permie forums have been inundated lately too.

[purecajn]

that delay had me double posting when I first started. I'm one of those that rushes into a site rather than reading everything properly tho. But I feel this is the norm

[ecodharmamark]

oh well it would help if people knew about it. I certainly didn't and I can't see any way that I could have learned about it except what has happened. The symbol itself totally escaped my notice and I would have ignored it if i had noticed since it doesn't look like anything that means anything much to me...

I would have thought that you did know about it, sun burn. After all, you did respond to this thread:

http://forums.permaculture.org.au/showthread.php?9338-On-Behalf-of-the-Mods&p=67474#post67474

...with this post:

http://forums.permaculture.org.au/showthread.php?9338-On-Behalf-of-the-Mods&p=67521#post67521

No matter, let's hope a few more regulars know about (and use) the 'report post' icon from now.

Cheerio all, Markos

[sun burn]

Fair enough that you thought that but guess what, i completely did not register that comment in the second paragraph of eco's post and I would not have known what she meant by the triangle thingy if I had. If i notice someone i think is spamming here, i usually make a comment in the thread cause i figure eco reads all the threads and would see it.

[milifestyle]

Some of the spam going through is not what i would call "General Viewing".

If it was a simple matter of a link to a viagra or other pharmacy site your suggestions would be a great idea sun burn...

Visually, some of the images posted are extremely pornographic... Leaving these types of posts up to the reader to determine as spam or not would give the PRI a rather perhaps unwanted and unwarranted reputation...

[sun burn]

fair enough i guess.

[Michaelangelica]

just 'soft deleted' a spam
I wonder how it got though; want to have a look?

[pebble]

I remember when the spam used to show onsite before it was deleted. You'd arrive at the new threads page and it would be full of spam. There is always going to be a delay between the spam arriving and when someone can delete it. It's a bad look when there are 20 new posts and 18 of them are spam - it puts off people joining and taking part.

[9anda1f]

Just as some background, here's an article that describes the benefits of the spam that only contains links to rankings in search engines:

http://searchengineland.com/new-york-times-exposes-j-c-penney-link-scheme-that-causes-plummeting-rankings-in-google-64529

Getting many links back to your site out into the www is one of the reasons we have so many spambots that merely open an account, put a link into their signature, and then log-in. They're hoping to be "found" by the search engine web crawlers and subsequently raise their search ranking. (which isn't to say there isn't other kinds of spam postings too). During the last months "spam fest" we were being overrun with these link-only spambots, seeing new accounts created every few minutes or more!

But things seem better now ... thanks Craig!

[pebble]

Every few minutes! What a nightmare. Thanks to you all for dealing with this.