LAVA Spam and Upgrades

[hooovahh]

I don't have that feature available to me. I'll mention it to the admin.

[bjustice]

[LogMAN]

They apparently took that as a challenge. Quick! We need stronger memes!

[hooovahh]

It's just every morning sorry. I was getting emails when reports came in. This made it easy to review them from my phone as they came in but that broke some time last year.  So now I need to check the site for spam, or reported content.

[LogMAN]

Thanks again for taking care of the mess!

Is it easier if we report every spam account or does it only put more spam in your inbox?

[hooovahh]

2 hours ago, LogMAN said:

Is it easier if we report every spam account or does it only put more spam in your inbox?

It does put more spam in my inbox. Honestly with how frequent things are I'd say make a single report of any kind, then I'll review all the posts by the newest users. Banning a user deletes all of their stuff, so just one report to get my attention is enough.

[LogMAN]

Sounds good 👍

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On 8/22/2024 at 5:28 PM, hooovahh said:

It does put more spam in my inbox. Honestly with how frequent things are I'd say make a single report of any kind, then I'll review all the posts by the newest users. Banning a user deletes all of their stuff, so just one report to get my attention is enough.

I do note that in the list of currently logged in users there are regularly users whose name looks suspicious and when checking them out they have supposedly 20, 40 or more posts but no current activity. Is this part of keeping them in the dark after banning them? Let them log in anyways and also maybe even create posts that are then consequently immediately /dev/nulled?

I really wish Michael could throw that switch to require moderator approval of the first 3 or so post for every new user! It's not so nice to login on LavaG and find no new post by anyone as has been the case regularly lately, but I prefer that many times above finding a whole list of spam posts about call girls, drugs, counterfeit money and secret societies that are waiting for nothing else than to heap money over anyone who is willing to sell their soul to them.

Edited August 24 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[LogMAN]

3 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

I really wish Michael could throw that switch to require moderator approval of the first 3 or so post for every new user! It's not so nice to login on LavaG and find no new post by anyone as has been the case regularly lately, but I prefer that many times above finding a whole list of spam posts about call girls, drugs, counterfeit money and secret societies that are waiting for nothing else than to heap money over anyone who is willing to sell their soul to them.

Since user creation is disabled anyways, this should sufficiently prevent any spam posts from being displayed to regular users. Although, it probably will flood the moderator inbox.

Perhaps CAPTCHA could be a viable option? Especially for newly created posts like the ones currently being spammed.

Not sure if there are options to require CAPTCHA for new users and relax the requirement for users of higher ranks, but that could be something worth looking into.

Edited August 24 by LogMAN

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

It's starting to get really ridiculous. They seem to have optimized their spam bots to the point where they spam two forums with 120 posts so far, and others incidentally, most likely as trial to get them flooded too. If this continues like this you can shutdown this forum altogether! Nobody is coming here to see this shit and it drives the few that come here definitely away.

I really hope Michael can find his admin login credentials and do something about this.

 

Please let me ban Baba's this and Baba's that, visha's and all those other accounts. Pretty pretty please!!!!!!!!! 

Edited August 26 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[Mefistotelis]

On 8/24/2024 at 7:06 PM, LogMAN said:

Perhaps CAPTCHA could be a viable option?

There are already few completely automated captcha solving services, last year they claimed 70% success rate, now they say the success rate is higher than humans do, but much faster. And this will improve fast, with LLMs getting more integrated with image recognition.

With various degree of notoriety, this affects the whole Internet. We just need a new general method of recognizing bots.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

1 hour ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

It's starting to get really ridiculous. They seem to have optimized their spam bots to the point where they spam two forums with 120 posts so far, and others incidentally, most likely as trial to get them flooded too. If this continues like this you can shutdown this forum altogether! Nobody is coming here to see this shit and it drives the few that come here definitely away.

I really hope Michael can find his admin login credentials and do something about this.

 

Please let me ban Baba's this and Baba's that, visha's and all those other accounts. Pretty pretty please!!!!!!!!! 

Obviously disabling account creation does nothing! They are currently creating new accounts about every 10 minutes. And then start spamming a few minutes later. There still are some active logins here and there from accounts with names that are fairly telling, and that obviously have been banned already, with 0 recent activity, created a few days ago, but supposedly having 10s of posts according to the account page.

What seems disabled is the Recent Profile Visitors block on the account pages for everybody. Not sure what that helps with, but it definitely is not the solution.

At the current rate, banning accounts after they posted dozen or hundreds of messages, is simply not a manageable solution anymore. If this can't be changed, this forum is dead.

Edited August 26 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[LogMAN]

45 minutes ago, Mefistotelis said:

There are already few completely automated captcha solving services, last year they claimed 70% success rate, now they say the success rate is higher than humans do, but much faster. And this will improve fast, with LLMs getting more integrated with image recognition.

With various degree of notoriety, this affects the whole Internet. We just need a new general method of recognizing bots.

While that may be true, the current spam posts are clearly not using any advanced technologies like that. At the very least, enabling captchas will force them to invest much more processing power to solve them, which either reduces the number of posts they can send, or discourages them from pursuing it any further. In conjunction with IP blocking, this can be very effective against these kinds of script kiddies.

1 hour ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

Please let me ban Baba's this and Baba's that, visha's and all those other accounts. Pretty pretty please!!!!!!!!! 

Second that!

[LogMAN]

15 minutes ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

What seems disabled is the Recent Profile Visitors block on the account pages for everybody. Not sure what that helps with, but it definitely is not the solution.

You mean this?

It's still visible for me.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

1 hour ago, LogMAN said:

You mean this?

It's still visible for me.

Not for me for most accounts, but that is a minor nuisance. But just checked and funnily I can view it on yours.

But the current situation really breaks the camels back. I refuse to be racist, but the obvious Indian influence in it simply makes me very angry.

I propose to simply take it offline until something can be done about it. This is less than not useful as is.

Edited August 26 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[LogMAN]

39 minutes ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

Not for me for most accounts, but that is a minor nuisance. But just checked and funnily I can view it on yours.

There is an option in your profile settings to disable individual blocks on the profile page. Perhaps it was disabled on the accounts you checked.

40 minutes ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

But the current situation really breaks the camels back. I refuse to be racist, but the obvious Indian influence in it simply makes me very angry.

I propose to simply take it offline until something can be done about it. This is less than not useful as is.

Yeah that's a good idea. It appears that some visitors/guests find their ways through search engines, but if anyone is asking questions there is just no way to see them through all the spam. I'd be happy to help block spammers but the way it is now just isn't sustainable and makes the site literally unusable. I hope Michael intervenes soon while it is still manageable.

[hooovahh]

Oh yeah it sucks. I do what I can, I contact the admin when there are issues I can't resolve. I appreciate your patients.

[LogMAN]

Thanks for keeping up the fight! I don't even want to imagine your inbox on a Monday...

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On 8/27/2024 at 7:35 PM, hooovahh said:

Oh yeah it sucks. I do what I can, I contact the admin when there are issues I can't resolve. I appreciate your patients.

More than 1000 posts further after the long weekend! I really would appreciate if Michael could step in for a minute here. Do you have any idea if he is still around?

[hooovahh]

I do occasionally have correspondence with him. He is aware of the spam issue and we've talked about turning on content approval. He seems to want to update the forums and just has limited bandwidth to do so. Until that happens I'll just keep cleaning up the spam that gets through.

[ShaunR]

2 hours ago, hooovahh said:

I do occasionally have correspondence with him. He is aware of the spam issue and we've talked about turning on content approval. He seems to want to update the forums and just has limited bandwidth to do so. Until that happens I'll just keep cleaning up the spam that gets through.

The longer it is unresolved, the less likely users will bother to return. I used to check the forums every day. Now it is every couple of weeks. Soon it will be never.

Some might see that as a bonus 

Edited September 4 by ShaunR

[Mads]

16 hours ago, ShaunR said:

The longer it is unresolved, the less likely users will bother to return. I used to check the forums every day. Now it is every couple of weeks. Soon it will be never.

Some might see that as a bonus 

I agree, with the former😉 It is time to pause the planning to redecorate the kitchen when there is a fire in the living room (no matter how fire retardent the new paint is going to be).

[hooovahh]

4 hours ago, Mads said:

I agree, with the former😉 It is time to pause the planning to redecorate the kitchen when there is a fire in the living room (no matter how fire retardent the new paint is going to be).

We are at the whim of the city planners to approve of the use of the fire extinguisher...okay the analogy falls apart a bit there.

[LogMAN]

Spoiler: don't do that on the weekend 😭

[Mads]