ML
    • Recent
    • Categories
    • Tags
    • Popular
    • Users
    • Groups
    • Register
    • Login

    Serious spam on SW

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Water Closet
    32 Posts 4 Posters 5.2k Views
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • scottalanmillerS
      scottalanmiller
      last edited by

      Seven spam messages while I wrote that response.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • tonyshowoffT
        tonyshowoff @scottalanmiller
        last edited by

        @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

        @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

        @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

        @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

        @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

        It's still happening in real time, now.

        Yep, I'm up to 1,544

        Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)

        Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.

        I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.

        I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money. 😛

        scottalanmillerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • tonyshowoffT
          tonyshowoff @scottalanmiller
          last edited by

          @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

          I think there is some logic going on where they don't want to block posting in non-European alphabets in case there is a legit user in there. But has there ever been someone intentionally posting in any Asian script? I totally understand the desire not to alienate anyone, but it's to a point that it's easily the bulk of their traffic, at least much of the time, and it is alienating everyone else.

          We haven't had that problem at all, because basically almost all these spam bots use the same databases for open proxies and so forth, so checking against DNSDBL/RBL alone cuts down on about 90% of it. In addition to CAPTCHA for account creation, throttling, and just keeping recent post IPs in memory, it sounds more complex than it is, and it does a lot. It's completely language independent too, we get people posting in all kinds of scripts, though Cyrillic is the most used non-Latin script. We also get a lot of Japanese, in fact the Japanese language version of our site is very popular though they don't post as much; probably a cultural thing.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • scottalanmillerS
            scottalanmiller @tonyshowoff
            last edited by

            @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

            @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

            @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

            @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

            @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

            @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

            It's still happening in real time, now.

            Yep, I'm up to 1,544

            Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)

            Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.

            I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.

            I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money. 😛

            We had the same issue here and fixed it quickly as well. And then deleted the accounts that were created to do it to clean things up.

            tonyshowoffT 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • tonyshowoffT
              tonyshowoff @scottalanmiller
              last edited by

              @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

              @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

              @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

              @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

              @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

              @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

              @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

              It's still happening in real time, now.

              Yep, I'm up to 1,544

              Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)

              Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.

              I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.

              I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money. 😛

              We had the same issue here and fixed it quickly as well. And then deleted the accounts that were created to do it to clean things up.

              Oh definitely, the more clever bots will sit on accounts for long periods so we purge unused accounts regularly.

              scottalanmillerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • scottalanmillerS
                scottalanmiller @tonyshowoff
                last edited by

                @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                It's still happening in real time, now.

                Yep, I'm up to 1,544

                Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)

                Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.

                I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.

                I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money. 😛

                We had the same issue here and fixed it quickly as well. And then deleted the accounts that were created to do it to clean things up.

                Oh definitely, the more clever bots will sit on accounts for long periods so we purge unused accounts regularly.

                Yup, same here. If an old, idle account looks suspicious, we purge them so that they don't flag as spammable later.

                tonyshowoffT 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • tonyshowoffT
                  tonyshowoff @scottalanmiller
                  last edited by

                  @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                  @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                  @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                  @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                  @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                  @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                  @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                  @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                  @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                  It's still happening in real time, now.

                  Yep, I'm up to 1,544

                  Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)

                  Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.

                  I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.

                  I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money. 😛

                  We had the same issue here and fixed it quickly as well. And then deleted the accounts that were created to do it to clean things up.

                  Oh definitely, the more clever bots will sit on accounts for long periods so we purge unused accounts regularly.

                  Yup, same here. If an old, idle account looks suspicious, we purge them so that they don't flag as spammable later.

                  We can't really look at them, because there are about 2,000 account creations per day, so it's automated. The job to clean them out runs once a day, but only deletes accounts which created no content (no uploads, no comments) and haven't been active in 30 days. I think we delete probably 90 per day on average through that.

                  scottalanmillerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • scottalanmillerS
                    scottalanmiller @tonyshowoff
                    last edited by

                    @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                    @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                    @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                    @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                    @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                    @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                    @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                    @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                    @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                    @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                    It's still happening in real time, now.

                    Yep, I'm up to 1,544

                    Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)

                    Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.

                    I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.

                    I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money. 😛

                    We had the same issue here and fixed it quickly as well. And then deleted the accounts that were created to do it to clean things up.

                    Oh definitely, the more clever bots will sit on accounts for long periods so we purge unused accounts regularly.

                    Yup, same here. If an old, idle account looks suspicious, we purge them so that they don't flag as spammable later.

                    We can't really look at them, because there are about 2,000 account creations per day, so it's automated. The job to clean them out runs once a day, but only deletes accounts which created no content (no uploads, no comments) and haven't been active in 30 days. I think we delete probably 90 per day on average through that.

                    Still small enough to not automate here, although that's rapidly becoming impossible.

                    tonyshowoffT 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • tonyshowoffT
                      tonyshowoff @scottalanmiller
                      last edited by

                      @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                      @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                      @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                      @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                      @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                      @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                      @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                      @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                      @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                      @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                      @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                      It's still happening in real time, now.

                      Yep, I'm up to 1,544

                      Insanity. I wonder if anyone is talking about it (other than us.)

                      Well, I spent several minutes just trying to find the appropriate forums earlier, but nobody had posted about it. I don't think anyone knows. I truly do not understand how the Korean thing repeatedly happened, and now this.

                      I wonder too, it's been years of this as a continuous problem. It seems like it would be easy to fix.

                      I can assure you, it is, we had (as you can easily imagine) a huge spam problem years ago before we implemented what I mentioned before. Spam does get through, but very rarely, and given there's a few hundred thousand people even active even on the least busy days of the year (Christmas, New Years, etc) there's always people reporting stuff, and if an account is new, it's automatically flagged and hidden for moderation later... if reported by a trusted account. There's a system based upon time, contribution, etc that I completely ripped off from Stackoverflow, though if you become a subscription member (no ads, certain HD videos through partners) then it skips all that crap and I trust you implicitly because you give me money. 😛

                      We had the same issue here and fixed it quickly as well. And then deleted the accounts that were created to do it to clean things up.

                      Oh definitely, the more clever bots will sit on accounts for long periods so we purge unused accounts regularly.

                      Yup, same here. If an old, idle account looks suspicious, we purge them so that they don't flag as spammable later.

                      We can't really look at them, because there are about 2,000 account creations per day, so it's automated. The job to clean them out runs once a day, but only deletes accounts which created no content (no uploads, no comments) and haven't been active in 30 days. I think we delete probably 90 per day on average through that.

                      Still small enough to not automate here, although that's rapidly becoming impossible.

                      That's a good problem to have though 🙂

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • tonyshowoffT
                        tonyshowoff
                        last edited by

                        I reported some of the initial Chinese posts as spam and I'm just now getting notifications they were deleted. Though, I am also getting about 2 new notifications per minute of new posts, so they aren't really fixing the problem. All the buckets in the world won't help if you don't put a pin in it.

                        scottalanmillerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                        • scottalanmillerS
                          scottalanmiller @tonyshowoff
                          last edited by

                          @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                          I reported some of the initial Chinese posts as spam and I'm just now getting notifications they were deleted. Though, I am also getting about 2 new notifications per minute of new posts, so they aren't really fixing the problem. All the buckets in the world won't help if you don't put a pin in it.

                          I got 21 during the last paragraph. It has to be easy to fix this.... how do they stop it each time? Do they just ignore it and it stops after a few hours? Do they block it and they find a new way it? It's odd how it keeps going, but isn't eternal.

                          tonyshowoffT 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                          • tonyshowoffT
                            tonyshowoff @scottalanmiller
                            last edited by tonyshowoff

                            @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                            @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                            I reported some of the initial Chinese posts as spam and I'm just now getting notifications they were deleted. Though, I am also getting about 2 new notifications per minute of new posts, so they aren't really fixing the problem. All the buckets in the world won't help if you don't put a pin in it.

                            I got 21 during the last paragraph. It has to be easy to fix this.... how do they stop it each time? Do they just ignore it and it stops after a few hours? Do they block it and they find a new way it? It's odd how it keeps going, but isn't eternal.

                            I figured they maybe blocked the IP addresses being used and the bots give up with that combined with their posts being deleted. Certainly it's completely automated so even a CAPTCHA would do wonders, and they don't even have that.

                            8 new ones whilst writing that.

                            scottalanmillerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • scottalanmillerS
                              scottalanmiller @tonyshowoff
                              last edited by

                              @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                              @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                              @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                              I reported some of the initial Chinese posts as spam and I'm just now getting notifications they were deleted. Though, I am also getting about 2 new notifications per minute of new posts, so they aren't really fixing the problem. All the buckets in the world won't help if you don't put a pin in it.

                              I got 21 during the last paragraph. It has to be easy to fix this.... how do they stop it each time? Do they just ignore it and it stops after a few hours? Do they block it and they find a new way it? It's odd how it keeps going, but isn't eternal.

                              I figured they maybe blocked the IP addresses being used and the bots give up with that combined with their posts being deleted. Certainly it's completely automated so even a CAPTCHA would do wonders, and they don't even have that.

                              8 new ones whilst writing that.

                              @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                              @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                              @tonyshowoff said in Serious spam on SW:

                              I reported some of the initial Chinese posts as spam and I'm just now getting notifications they were deleted. Though, I am also getting about 2 new notifications per minute of new posts, so they aren't really fixing the problem. All the buckets in the world won't help if you don't put a pin in it.

                              I got 21 during the last paragraph. It has to be easy to fix this.... how do they stop it each time? Do they just ignore it and it stops after a few hours? Do they block it and they find a new way it? It's odd how it keeps going, but isn't eternal.

                              I figured they maybe blocked the IP addresses being used and the bots give up with that combined with their posts being deleted. Certainly it's completely automated so even a CAPTCHA would do wonders, and they don't even have that.

                              8 new ones whilst writing that.

                              Oh right, might be a single IP address.

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • scottalanmillerS
                                scottalanmiller
                                last edited by

                                Looks like they managed to get it stopped around 12:36PM EST.

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                • tonyshowoffT
                                  tonyshowoff
                                  last edited by

                                  It begins again, guess they didn't fix it (no duh).

                                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • tonyshowoffT
                                    tonyshowoff
                                    last edited by

                                    Add ReCAPTCHA or something, jeeze!

                                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                    • DanpD
                                      Danp
                                      last edited by

                                      I don't see any of these "spam" postings. Are they located in a specific category or group?

                                      scottalanmillerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                                      • scottalanmillerS
                                        scottalanmiller @Danp
                                        last edited by

                                        @Danp said in Serious spam on SW:

                                        I don't see any of these "spam" postings. Are they located in a specific category or group?

                                        They get deleted, if you had email notifications you should have been swamped. If not, their mods run around deleting them as fast as they can.

                                        tonyshowoffT 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                        • tonyshowoffT
                                          tonyshowoff @scottalanmiller
                                          last edited by tonyshowoff

                                          @scottalanmiller said in Serious spam on SW:

                                          @Danp said in Serious spam on SW:

                                          I don't see any of these "spam" postings. Are they located in a specific category or group?

                                          They get deleted, if you had email notifications you should have been swamped. If not, their mods run around deleting them as fast as they can.

                                          Yes, exactly, I receive 2,583 notifications so far. Plus also I posted a screen shot at the top of what it looks like before they get deleted.

                                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • scottalanmillerS
                                            scottalanmiller
                                            last edited by

                                            They were deleted users like crazy, too.

                                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                            • 1
                                            • 2
                                            • 1 / 2
                                            • First post
                                              Last post