Spam in the Blogs

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

There are at least three spam posts in the Lava blog but normal users don't seem to have the right to report them. So I'm doing it here.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Seems it is again the time to clean out the blog spam.

[tnt]

The last few weeks there is a lot of spam from "new" users/bots (e.g. > 10 new topis within 1 hour)

 

For some reason I find the new spam topics much more annoyant when compared to a single spam message as a reply inside a topic.

Can the number of new topics a user can start to be limited to e.g. 1 or 2 a day?
(Also prevents new/novice users to post the same question in multiple categories)

 

I also remember a topic where someone proposed for adding a kind of LabVIEW Captcha

with a simple CLAD-question to prove the new user has a basic knowledge.

 

 

... just my thoughts ...

[hooovahh]

Yes I too find the new spam bots more annoying.  When I go to my RSS feed I got quite excited when I saw new posts, then I had to wade through the 100+ junk posts to find any useful content.  Maybe it was a coincidence but it seemed like activity from legitimate users of LAVA dipped when this was going on.  Possibly because others found the spam inconvenient too.

 

I'm all for limiting new user topics being made to so many a day.  The CLAD level questions I'm not as much a fan of simply because I wouldn't want to hinder the new users from finding LAVA.  It's a great resource if your new to LabVIEW or not but what ever keeps the spam out I guess.

[LogMAN]

Count me in. The spam is to much to compensate in the last weeks and so many topics are lost/unseen in the process. It seems to be a single bot/person that will go on for some time. The moderators are doing their job, but that will not be enough if this goes on.

 

I think a post limit is a good start, however it should be a limit to new members (like for the first 1-2 Weeks after creating an account?), thus limiting the amount of damage and providing the community with the ability to recover very quickly. However the spammer will eventually figgure out a way to generate new accounts automatically, which will cause a new flood of spam with or without the limit.

 

An additional way to deal with spam is to allow regular members to mark somebody as 'spammer' in order to limit his movements or even temporarily remove the latest (like today) posts of a suspect until a LavaG Moderator looked into the matter personally. This feature should only be entrusted to members who are in club 500 or higher (and the premium members I guess). As the moderators cannot keep up with the spam (sorry, but I guess the community is much faster here), this might be a way to get rid of such situations in the future very quickly by the community itself. And the moderators still have full control over the situations and what happens to such accounts.

 

Just an idea though and I have no clue how complicate such a function would be to implement. However the community here is great and could be entrusted with this in my opinion.

 

A LabVIEW captcha (aka CLAD questions) is not very helpful and could easily be avoided, once all the possible solutions are known. If it has to be a captcha, use a regular captcha (picture with random numbers/characters). Anyways LavaG would loose much of its flavor this way. I like how we are trusted without such a security measure.

[Val Brown]

The simplest solution is generally the best.  Limit new users to 1 post per day for the first month.  A month might seem harsh but, over time, that "quarantine" period could be decreased until we find the minimum above which spammer bots don't pursue; and I suspect that might end of being a week or less.

 

An additional factor would for regular users to be able to flag a new user suspected of being a spam bot as "spamming" so that a LAVA moderator is alerted to ascertain what is happening.

 

Yes, they ARE incredibly annoying... 

[Jordan Kuehn]

I think I've mentioned it before, but a minimum post count before being allowed to post links is also helpful.

[hooovahh]

I think I just realized why on the NI forums you are not allowed to post a topic where the word "watch" appears in the body of the message.  They apparently found it to be the easiest way to limit this type of spam.

Edited October 15, 2013 by hooovahh

[Michael Aivaliotis]

Please use the report post to moderator link. otherwise we have no idea there's an issue. Believe it or not, moderators don't read every post.

[LogMAN]

Please use the report post to moderator link. otherwise we have no idea there's an issue. Believe it or not, moderators don't read every post.

 

Well I use this function if there is a single spam around (I actually did that on the very first spam-post), but there have been 100+ posts since, which are hard to keep up to. However you should have received 8 more reports just now . I don't think it's necessary to read all posts, since the titles in the RSS are quite obvious. However if reporting is how it has to be done, you can be sure I'll send reports.

[hooovahh]

Well I use this function if there is a single spam around (I actually did that on the very first spam-post), but there have been 100+ posts since, which are hard to keep up to. However you should have received 8 more reports just now . I don't think it's necessary to read all posts, since the titles in the RSS are quite obvious. However if reporting is how it has to be done, you can be sure I'll send reports.

Yeah I don't mind clicking report for all of these, I just hope the admins can sort by posts, so if they see the same post reported as spam 20 times they can just delete that post and remove the 20 reports they get.

 

On a slightly different topic does LAVA need more volunteers for admins?  I always get the feeling that there are only a few admins, and almost 20,000 members (most with 0 or 1 post but still)

[dannyt]

Hi

 

I have reported a few of these to the moderators, but like some others here I was worried of swamping the moderator's. I think at times it would be better to report a users than a specific post.

 

I wondered if any of the moderators were outside the USA time zone ? so as to spread the load a remove users quicker before they can go some many topics in place

[ShaunR]

It's been a problem all around the internet of late (not just LAVA). Even spam killers such as Akismet are not immune.

 

It was such a problem that I wrote a plugin for the CMS I use and released it last week to the CMS community. I get zero spam on my site, so I'm waiting to see how effective it is for those really suffering..

[MikaelH]

It would be nice, if I could block/filter out people's posts.

E.g.:

Nautankii1

MoviesNU

lotus123

 

...or have access to report these users.

[hooovahh]

We are all of the engineering mind set, and as a result I'm sure each of us can come up with an equally effective way of blocking the spam.  Block users, have Report to Moderators temporarily remove the post, blocking by IP etc.  But many of us don't know what tools the LAVA Admins have to combat this issue.  Until told otherwise I will just keep doing as Michael has instructed, and continue to report spam using the Report to Moderator.

[Jordan Kuehn]

We are all of the engineering mind set, and as a result I'm sure each of us can come up with an equally effective way of blocking the spam.  Block users, have Report to Moderators temporarily remove the post, blocking by IP etc.  But many of us don't know what tools the LAVA Admins have to combat this issue.  Until told otherwise I will just keep doing as Michael has instructed, and continue to report spam using the Report to Moderator.

 

In that case, perhaps more mods is the answer.  I would be more than happy to clear out all the spam that I see each day.

[Yair]

I would be more than happy to clear out all the spam that I see each day.

 

Likewise. It worked well when we sorted the old content in the past and I expect it should work reasonably well now. I think it's important to handle this because I think this much spam really hurts the usability of the site (I assume that it should be relatively easy to check how many non-spam posts were posted compared to last month).

[Phillip Brooks]

I helped some with the old content, and would be glad to help with the spammers...

[dannyt]

Same here I would be happy to help

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

There is another spam post in the blogs.

 

Please use the report post to moderator link. otherwise we have no idea there's an issue. Believe it or not, moderators don't read every post.

 

I would, but the Report Entry button on blog posts shows a privilege error when I press it. So there seems no way to report a blog post directly.

[hooovahh]

I would, but the Report Entry button on blog posts shows a privilege error when I press it. So there seems no way to report a blog post directly.

Sorry to hear this I'm sending Michael a message to see if he has a fix.  In the mean time what you can do is go to the user who posted the spam, and report them instead of reporting the single post.