Spammers: "All your forums are belong to us."

[c2chaos]

Spam activity is rising.
Anyone else noticed it?
Anyone else find it a little annoying?

lol. In the past few months I noticed a few spammers were nice enough to participate in existing topics and be on topic, but with semi-bad English.

[otakuya]

Ive never seen spammers that nice before, or ones that actually stay on topic. Just be sure not to click their sigs.

[PyronIkari]

Ive never seen spammers that nice before, or ones that actually stay on topic. Just be sure not to click their sigs.

They're bots. How they work is they scan for keywords and topics, and it generates a reply based on that. So if a topic is about sports, it will pick up keywords based on that and make a generic reply like "I really like the Raiders! I wish they'd win the Super Bowl" or the such.

Outside of making the registration service a lot more complicated, there's really not much you can do to prevent it outside of making the forum private setted. Since this is a public board for the con, just deal with it.

[c2chaos]

Should we report them anyway?  :-\

[otakuya]

Um, bump? There seems to be a surge of spam lately. Anything we 'regular' posters can do? I don't want to swamp the mods' inboxes though.

[TC X0 Lt 0X]

The best we can do is as users is report spammers to the Mods.

[G.I.R]

Hey, has anyone else gotten spam posts on their YouTube channel?  SRSLY.

[sysadmin]

This is probably better in the "About the Forums" area so that I can see it.

Anyway, yeah, I'm sick of the forum spam too.
It's really peaked in the last 60 days.
Loosely, there's a -lot- of hacked gmail, hotmail, yahoo accounts that are seeding most of it.

I've installed an extra set of spam filters to help stem the flow.
There are probably two more than I may install.

I also have about 20000 accounts to review and purge.
Fun times.

[c2chaos]

This is probably better in the "About the Forums" area so that I can see it.

Anyway, yeah, I'm sick of the forum spam too.
It's really peaked in the last 60 days.
Loosely, there's a -lot- of hacked gmail, hotmail, yahoo accounts that are seeding most of it.

I've installed an extra set of spam filters to help stem the flow.
There are probably two more than I may install.

I also have about 20000 accounts to review and purge.
Fun times.

I wish I could help with that. :/

[sysadmin]

I appreciate the sentiment.

The current sets of filter (4 levels now) seem to help, but a few break through.

Right now, we're being assaulted by spammers whose primary role is to register accounts, then put links in their sig.
This is so that google will find the link, and add it to its search engine.  This is bad.
They don't tend to post(*), but I still find that a bannable offense.
I've deleted about 5000 accounts so far.

Hopefully, the actual comment spam will dry up to less than one-per-week, which will make me happy.

(*) The one exception was an account that was indeed a spammer, but actually seemed to like talking about Japanese animation, and had several conversations in the threads. 

[otakuya]

(*) The one exception was an account that was indeed a spammer, but actually seemed to like talking about Japanese animation, and had several conversations in the threads.

You sure it's not one of those generic bots like what Pyron mentioned above?

[sysadmin]

Yes, indeed.

It was about 400 posts all told, in an actual conversation.

So either spambots have passed the Turing Test and gained sentience, or someone was just interested in talking on a forum (then turned their signature into a link for discount furniture)

[c2chaos]

Yes, indeed.

It was about 400 posts all told, in an actual conversation.

So either spambots have passed the Turing Test and gained sentience, or someone was just interested in talking on a forum (then turned their signature into a link for discount furniture)

Who is this user? I must see for myself.