Suggestion Stopping Spambots

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Ethanicus

Guest
You know how it is. After around 10 there starts a relentless wave of Korean spambots selling you football tickets or strength pills.

Well I see in some things they all share in common:
  • High amount of links
  • URLs in the title
  • Pretty much anything involving football really
I think if we could perhaps stick link count limits on people who've only existed for a day or prevent people from posting with URLs in the title altogether, we'd slow down the spammers a bit. Obviously these can be circumvented but it takes out a large majority of them.

Any other suggestions?
 

Micah_DS

Member
It might just be that I'm on at all the wrong times these days, but yeah, spam seems to be noticeably far less than it was.

Actually, I haven't been so lucky as to spot even one single spam post since about a week or so after Nocturne made some changes.
 
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Aura

Guest
There's already a limit on how many links a post can contain. Bringing it any lower would cause trouble for legit users. As for putting the limit only on new users, that would require a third party plugin.

Disabling links in topic titles might work, but there are a number of non-English users who usually use the entire URL for describing a service in the topic title, such as google.com for Google and dropbox.com for Dropbox. It's not possible with the native forum software functionality either for that matter.

Ah, yes, there's no way to tell if a topic is about football either. ^^'

As others have said, Nocturne has already set up a system to get rid of spam and things have improved since then. I rarely see spam now. If I do, it doesn't stay for longs, so things are pretty much under control. Just keep reporting spam as much as possible.
 

TehPilot

Member
Limiting new user privileges is something I've seen other message boards pull off well, but I don't know if it would help much with the GMC. Notably, one board I was on prevented people with under 12 posts from making new threads except for a designated subforum. Limiting thread creation to Q&A for new members would be the most applicable answer since that's the biggest posting ground for transient users, but then the spam would probably just move to there and I'd rather have it in Off Topic if it has to exist.

If reliable automation to delete spam gets going, that's Cool and Good. I've only ever seen spam topics at awful hours in the morning for my timezone, and rarely for long.
 
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