Spam Attacks
- Thread starter Enzo1
- Start date
that means we would all get the same start date again
miss the waffle train & post chase to the top
99% off topic days
I reported a bunch last night which were cleaned up immediately, but they seemed to have started again afterwards.
Nuked him; banned and cleaned up.
We have that for the community of my work. The day they introduce that on the N3V forum is the day I will resign as moderator; it gives such a huge amount of work. I prefer to nuke a hand full of spammers each day. It takes 3 minutes or so of my time against having the approve (and read) a hundred or so posts.
Currently we have 4-5 sort of active moderators. If 2 of them are sleeping, 2 working and the other having a social life, it can take a few hours before it get noticed.
Just keep reporting them when you see them. We have a few days without any and today we have a few. It happens.
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To be fair those forums don't actually get that many new members maybe one or two a month they are fairly static these days since the social Media obsession took off, so probably not such a chore.
Looks like this latest attack is coming from a server based in Korea having done a whois on the address out of curiosity.
cascaderailroad
New member
Banning spammers one by one is not the way to do it ... as when you ban 10 ... 1000 more pop up
I saw on YouTube how professionals get rid of Spammers ... it is way above my mentality ... but it is not by banning them once that they appear, one by one ... that does not work
I saw on YouTube how professionals get rid of Spammers ... it is way above my mentality ... but it is not by banning them once that they appear, one by one ... that does not work
ryanstrains
Moderator
So you'd rather them continue to post spam rather than us banning them?
I think what he was trying to say is there are tools available to stop the spam attacks instead of playing Whack-O-Spam. These tools range from having new users request to join the forums and then the system forum administrator then adding the users in manually, or automatically once the user is vetted as a human. In the manual-method scenario, the user fills out the form on the sign-up/create account form. The information is sent to the admin's mailbox rather than through an automatic account processing script. Once the admin adds the user, a notification is sent to the new user with instructions on accessing the forums.
The other way is to introduce a Captcha type interface used at sign-up. The new user fills in all the information then has to be verified by the Captcha interface first before this is sent to the server. Once the user confirms that he or she is a human being, then the user can proceed and become a member of the community.
Both of these systems have their advantages and disadvantages though including the inconvenience to either the user or the system administrator.
John
Looking at the time between posts from todays pest he wasn't exactly rushing or a very good typist, that was definitely a human not any kind of bot so a captcha wouldn't have worked.
Simple answer is only people with registered copies of Trainz get write access, hard on people who may want to join to ask about Trainz but not entirely unusual for a forum or maybe just have the one open forum for potential Trainz purchaser questions? at least then any Spam would be in the one place, although I think todays actually was all in General Trainz.
My opinion here is, this idea could help encourage newbies to register. I have seen in multiple threads where someone is asked to register, and they don't bother. An added idea is to maybe have version numbers automatically added somewhere on the posts, like in the header or signature line. Bet this would help troubleshooting by noticable degrees.
I didn't look into details of the posts made today; there were plenty last night from S, Korea selling casino access. (I did translate the page).
I do agree that full access should be allowed only for those with a registered copy and having limited access to a public forum. I belong to some tech forums that work that way and it seems to work well.
John
CPRailSD40-2
GMD C44-9W
I am scared to click the Korean Casino posts. I do not want adware or such
cascaderailroad
New member
Looks like the ol' time consuming banning the spammer (as they appear) method, is not working, efficiently ... Don't look now, but ... They're Back !
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ryanstrains
Moderator
We do have lives outside the forums, and get no compensation for our work to keep everything under control. Just report the post and we will see it quickly (I have my phone set to go off as soon as a reported post comes in).
I would like to give a shoutout to my fellow moderators to say thank you for everything you've been doing to try to minimize the spam attacks!
ZecMurphy
Community Assistant
Hi All
Unfortunately, there really isn't any perfect solution to spamming, at least without either impacting accessibility for new members, or adding extra workload for our moderators. We have implemented some methods to help reduce this, such as a 'CAPTCHA' for users without versions of Trainz registered to them, and we are also looking into other options as well.
As registration is through the MyTrainz/Simulator Central websites and not the forum software (this is why the forums say registration is disabled), it is a little more difficult to add in steps in the registration to prevent spammers. In particular since the spam we are seeing is getting around the more common methods (CAPTCHA, and similar).
We do have several moderators, as well as team members with moderator/admin access, who keep an eye on the forums. But, there will still be some delays between reports being sent, and us being able to look into them.
As a note, we do have tools to remove multiple posts by the same user at once, so reporting each thread from a single user isn't necessary (it would be appreciated to put a note into the report saying that there are multiple threads). However, if there are multiple users, then please report each at least one post from each user.
Regards
Unfortunately, there really isn't any perfect solution to spamming, at least without either impacting accessibility for new members, or adding extra workload for our moderators. We have implemented some methods to help reduce this, such as a 'CAPTCHA' for users without versions of Trainz registered to them, and we are also looking into other options as well.
As registration is through the MyTrainz/Simulator Central websites and not the forum software (this is why the forums say registration is disabled), it is a little more difficult to add in steps in the registration to prevent spammers. In particular since the spam we are seeing is getting around the more common methods (CAPTCHA, and similar).
We do have several moderators, as well as team members with moderator/admin access, who keep an eye on the forums. But, there will still be some delays between reports being sent, and us being able to look into them.
As a note, we do have tools to remove multiple posts by the same user at once, so reporting each thread from a single user isn't necessary (it would be appreciated to put a note into the report saying that there are multiple threads). However, if there are multiple users, then please report each at least one post from each user.
Regards
