LAVA Spam and Upgrades

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

They finally found out how to spam every single subforum at least once in a night.

[crossrulz]

And now I'm seeing NSFW spam.  Seriously, until things get fixed, all new signups should be blocked.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

1 hour ago, crossrulz said:

And now I'm seeing NSFW spam.  Seriously, until things get fixed, all new signups should be blocked.

That was regularly true in the past, some of the callgirl spam so far was already NSFW.

[LogMAN]

I have opted to custom uBlock filters for certain keywords and specific user accounts to hide those entries from the activity stream. Not a perfect solution but it makes the page somewhat usable... at least I don't have to see that wall of crap all the time.

 

Edited September 14, 2024 by LogMAN

[crossrulz]

Yeah, but when the picture are suddenly in the "Unread Content" stream, it makes it a lot harder to ignore.

[LogMAN]

Well, yes. There is only so much we can do on the client side.

It also appears that some of the bots have recently figured out how to reply to their own posts. It is probably just a matter of time before our notification areas get bombarded...

[hooovahh]

One other odd side effect is I've seen several reports that are clearly bots, that think it is a reply system. The report will be a normal spam message but reporting some content. So at least those ones only I need to deal with and you won't see.  Sorry again about all this.  I have talked to the site admin again emphasizing the severity, and frequency.

[LogMAN]

20 hours ago, hooovahh said:

One other odd side effect is I've seen several reports that are clearly bots, that think it is a reply system. The report will be a normal spam message but reporting some content.

Oh that's hilarious 🤣

[Michael Aivaliotis]

Hello. I am not a bot...

I'm planning on taking the site offline this weekend to perform long overdue upgrades and to investigate ways to curb the spam attacks. Thanks to everyone for all the help cleaning up the forums. Hopefully I can find a solution and we can get back to the usual next week.

[LogMAN]

Unfortunately, it seems that the site upgrade did not fix the spam issue. Are there any new options at your disposal?

[Michael Aivaliotis]

I noticed that this morning. However, I'm adjusting some knobs behind the scenes. There will still be some that get through and I will be monitoring the forums for the next few weeks to optimize the settings.

[jcarmody]

Quote

Hello. I am not a bot...

Says the account with "AI" right in the name.  Hiding in plain sight!

eta: In fact, you can't even pronounce it without saying "AI" - "A I va lee oh tis".  Well, I can't, anyway...

Edited September 23, 2024 by jcarmody

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On 9/22/2024 at 6:14 PM, Michael Aivaliotis said:

I noticed that this morning. However, I'm adjusting some knobs behind the scenes. There will still be some that get through and I will be monitoring the forums for the next few weeks to optimize the settings.

It seems to start to work! Unless of course you have hired some elves that keep checking the forum and deleting any account created with nefarious motives. 😀

But it is quite some time that I came in the office in the morning and didn't get greeted by a stream of products of humanities lowest when opening LavaG. In fact there seems none, and the latest new member is already 21 hours ago and still has 0 accounted posts for, so he may be actually genuine.

Just hope that the moderators new message queue isn't overflowing with held back posts. Although you can always hope that it will die down once they realize that it has exactly 0.0% reach factor.

Edited September 25, 2024 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[Michael Aivaliotis]

@hooovahh Is still weeding out the spam. I think he's in the eastern US time zone so he's 3 hrs. ahead of me ☺️. Much thanks to him. But I'm also improving the filters. Unfortunately, I think there are some sleeper accounts that were created before the changes that are starting to post. But, yes, I think it's getting much better.

BTW, I just discovered that if you ctrl+right click a posted image you can set its' size! neat.

[Bryan]

I was relieved to login this morning and not see pages worth of spam when I clicked on the "Unread Content" link.  Awesome job to all!

Edited September 26, 2024 by Bryan

[LogMAN]

Yes! It is so much better now. Excellent work!

20 hours ago, Michael Aivaliotis said:

BTW, I just discovered that if you ctrl+right click a posted image you can set its' size! neat.

Edited September 26, 2024 by LogMAN

[Bryan]

Guess who's back?

Back again?

Spammers back.

Tell Admin...

[crossrulz]

Hopefully, these are just those sleeper accounts Michael mentioned earlier.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

14 minutes ago, crossrulz said:

Hopefully, these are just those sleeper accounts Michael mentioned earlier.

Unfortunately it seems not. They said both (the two I checked) that they were created less than an hour ago, when I looked this morning (GMT+2).

[hooovahh]

Thank you for your continued reports. If it continues to be a problem Michael will twist various knobs behind the scenes.

[Neil Pate]

Back again today, new user related I think

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

36 minutes ago, Neil Pate said:

Back again today, new user related I think

Unfortunately yes. First signed up 50 minutes ago and started spamming about 5 minutes later, then spamming about every 5 minutes. Second signed up 10 minutes ago and just started spamming.

Definitely related as it is both about Norton spam.

I'm very anti violence but these guys really get the worst in me out!  👿

Edited October 15, 2024 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[Neil Pate]

Yeah it is getting out of hand. Like others have mentioned, I used to browse here daily (often multiple times per day) but since the spam bots took over I stopped coming altogether.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

Just saw this update. Will take a look.